The real big takeaway from this video is that framing is what truly matters in discussion. If two people are arguing about a fire emblem unit or strategy, it is very easy for them to just argue past each other because they can't agree on the framework. I recently stumbled upon a 2 year old reddit threat where someone was arguing that FE10 Jill is overrated. They laid out a very well researched argument that, under their assumption of hard mode, no transfers and efficient play, Jill fails to reliably meet key thresholds in the lategame. Their whole argument was built on stat averages, including recently discovered formulas for calculating stat gains from bonus experience. The most common disagreement to their argument ended up being something like "you are not rigging enough". This situation pretty much sums up my stance on the issue. You can't have a good faith argument if you are not willing to have it on a common ground. The poster of that reddit argument disagreed with the common consensus that it is ok to rig stats for the sake of maximum efficiency, and his detractors were arguing in a way that at least implicitly assumes some amount of stat rigging. The result was a not exactly fruitful discussion.
Yikes. I was about to post some examples of my own of my frustrations with the FE community, but your example really takes the cake. It really goes to show how biased some people are, and how little self-awareness they have.
@@bladerdj3503 The argument about stat rigging is not without merit. Rigging stats for Nino doesn't give you anything that you couldn't get from other units in the same class. Rigging stats for Jill does give you the fastest possible clear, nobody else is as good as her. If we are talking about wanting to get the minimum turn count necessary, then stat rigging or resetting for critical hits is a legit strategy. I have not issue with someone trying to LTC a game and discussing a game within this framework. But there should be room for discussion outside of this.
@@FiboSai Ye and thats the point. Usually the strategies for LTCs, making it as easy as possible for you and the quality of a unit in a plain normal, casual run (rarely considering Permadeath) are often mixed and used as the framework for "Efficiency." Prime example of the collective agreement "That unit is good/S-Tier" would be in Mekkahs recent video about the Vaike > Robin thread. Surely, in any run below Lunatic Robin x Chrom A/S Rank is braindead AFK mode, but in Lunatic it takes some effort and abusing of game mechanics/grinding to make that work. But efficiency usually also means to make it easier in a somewhat fast as possible way. Rather thats what I always thought about Efficiency. I would 100% agree that Jill is, in a casual run even without rigging and stat boosters the best unit in Part 1 (alongside Nolan who comes earlier and is the tanky head of the Dawn brigade). Training her up makes your time a lot easier and is more desireable than giving others favoritism. In the end you get a second Haar. But then again we also have the situation that, in a ranked Run Nino is amazing to boost up your Level Stat and simultaneously becomes a pretty good magic user due to her growths. A stealable Promotion item is there one chapter after her recruitment (depending on difficulty). Another one right before the finale. If done right, Nino CAN become a decent unit, if not better than a trained Erk, Lucius or Canas. The latter has the Luna niche tho. But in the end you also get Athos which begs the question if you even need any mage besides Staff users and Pent (who IS a good staff user too). I think the biggest problem is not that the ways of ranking are still not 100% objective (and will never truly be), it is more that the "rules" don't really clarify enough in which ways a unit prevails or sucks. Especially now where Hard mode and more difficult hard mode, time rewind, shitton of skills and other ressources exist. And then we also have the typical toxic behaviour towards the ones who have a different opinion and don't get credit unless it turns out to be really good instantly or they are a big personality in the scene. I do feel that there were improvements over the years on that part tho. In the end, I feel it should be more about which units are good to use if you are unsure who to train or to learn how to build an army and know the most important aspects of what makes units good and less about the mentality of creating the most perfect army with the best units and builds. Latter are definitly good for Maddening, Lunatic modes and the likes. But there are at least 2 difficulties below that too. And, even if most of the FE games are over a decade old, the formula of using whatever you like (unless in Thracia pherhaps, for certain reasons) will still give you the chance to beat the game in a decent manner. It is incredible easy for a newcomer to get into the spot that you feel you need to have these perfect builds to have a good time (just like the Jagen Pitfall) which can ultimately rob you of your blind experience and therefore some enjoyment with the games. (And ye, this is a problem with many games for different reasons nowadays, but usually when you wanna get into older titles of a series like Fire Emblem you gotta dig into the internet and will encounter Elitists and the likes along the way - best tip is to do what you want and seek help if you REALLY get stuck somewhere).
the way people talk about fire emblem is kinda the same as if people talking about pokemon just assumed any discussion about a pokemon is within the context of a hardcore nuzlocke, when it's actually a very specific set of arbitrary restriction that only an extreme minority of players engage with.
Fire Emblem 7 was really just a story about delivering a Luna tome to Athos, and Fire Emblem 8 was just a story meant to cover up Seth's gratuitous violence.
A personal anecdote: I recently (like within the last year, recent in my brain at least) played two games through of Fire Emblem 8: The Sacred Stones. On my first playthrough, I intentionally promoted all units in the army away from horses, and made all forced horses into Great Knights that I could. For units like wyvern rider and pegasus knight, I promoted into the 'heaviest' class available, either wyvern lord or wyvern knight. The reign of Great Knights and Warriors, Sages and Bishops. It was fine and obliterated the game. The long march, trudging to inevitable victory. On my second playthrough, I intentionally promoted all units in the army possible onto a horse, and when multiple options available into the faster or lighter unit options. Neimi and Gerik as Rangers, Ewan and Lute as Mage Knights, and 5 Paladins charging to victory. I learned that the Ranger class actually feels really good to use, Neimi is actually one of my better units on that save IIRC. It was a very pleasant surprise. And while the first game play was fine and fun, this second round felt better and more fun to play. It was also faster, sure, but the movement speed alone was not the reason for that. It felt more, tactical, with so much ability to canto and do other things. Mage Knight and Valkyrie are amazing classes to use. Overall this version just felt more fluid and fun to play. The first game was easier, because the units were generally more tanky and just did not care about the enemies much, but the second game was not so hard as to make me think much of it. The army was noticeably frailer, but with 2 Mage Knights and 2 Valkyrie on the field, that was not a problem to heal through at all. It really is amazing how *different* the 2 runs of this game felt to play through, despite them being on the same game. It also made me think about the FE focus on efficiency, and makes me wonder if this is why so many FE7/8 players are so horse-crazy. It did feel very good to play, so like, I get it, if they played through the game and noticed the same feeling, it might make them assume that everyone always does the same thing and that is the normal.
Ironically though people tend to hate Ranger Gerik. I basically always used horse promotions whenever I could when playing SS even ones seen as sub optimal (Gerik, Natasha). The hardcore community tends to prefer horses... but Gerik and Natasha are exceptions in that regard. Granted they say "don't use Natasha" anyway.
One of the things I disagree with is the avoidance of comparing units - there is ultimately value in comparing units due to the restrictive nature of limited deployment slots. Tier List discussions hold value in that way and accomplish something unit guides/perfomance charts cannot, although I agree those have value also.
That's definitely something interesting to consider- in a sense, the games do force the player to choose certain units to use overs through limit deployment slots, outside of cases like Gaiden/SoV and Genealogy. Even in those games, you still generally need to choose which units get limited resources, which ranges from stat boosters to something as basic as being involved in combat to get EXP. I think there's still an issue in trying to say which units are more deserving of deployment/resources in a broad context. If the player is going for the "best" results under a certain metric, then certain strategies, classes, units, etc. can absolutely be argued to contribute to that goal. If the goal is just to beat the game, then it becomes a little trickier. From what I can tell, unit guides are actually still comparative, but they use categories that make general comparisons about broad aspects like ease of use and investment needed to have high performance. It's a lot more subjective, because as another comment pointed out, "ease of use" can also depend on the player, among some other issues. It's not strictly trying to say which strategy/unit is comparatively better, but still makes comparisons that lets players make informed decisions when choosing which units to deploy. Outside of a few obvious examples, it's difficult to say which units will be "better" for defeating the game for any given player if there's nothing else being measured. So while the player does have to choose between units, it's generally difficult to make comparisons that say which is a better choice, outside of the context of a specific playthrough actively aiming to get some sort of best results. The most applicable "metric" for comparisons that attempt to speak to how the game is "typically" played is ease of use. I totally think that it's worth talking about, but it has enough variance to where I think more categorical comparisons are both more fitting and effective. As for my rough idea of a unit performance chart, I also agree that shouldn't be all players use to discuss units or guide how they play. It's just one form of analysis that would let players express the same game knowledge they are now, but in a more consistent format that also lets other players contribute their non-standard experiences. At least, that was my goal, and it would need some polishing before getting used.
The critical imbalance lies with the idea that efficiency is a direct one to one to "skill and fun". It is for some, and isn't for others. Efficient runs are one way to play fire emblem, but they aren't the only way. As a kid who mindlessly played Eliwood Normal Mode a ton, I tried a bunch of strats to reach endgame. Training 1 unit only, training a well balanced army; none of it worked. I'd get to either Final Chapter or before it, die after a particularly long or hard chapter like Night of Farewells, and be too annoyed to continue the save file; reset, and repeat. Then one day, I tried training my lords; it worked. I got to the end, and didn't look back. The efficient strat of juggernauting with one unit as your main combatant, ala Marcus, failed me, even on the game's easiest difficulty (discounting Lyn Mode). It was only by finding a winning strategy that I was able to formulate lasting opinions about the characters, and their impact on the experience. I didn't have the knowledge or skill to solo run Marcus. Efficiency is a useful metric, but it isn't the whole picture. If you know how to *use* that efficiency properly, Kieran slaps FE9 while letting Ike sit back. A less proficient player would find more success training their Ike, and keeping Titania nearby, but not doing everything. But that's finishing the game; what if you're already good at doing that? Well, a more proficient player might enjoy the struggle of raising a zero to hero Nino, or constructing silly turn economy nonsense with their dancer. They might also enjoy watching Seth low-man the entirety of pre-rpute split with ferrybot Venessa. But this doesn't invalidate any one strategy or gameplat style. Bartre sucks hard without immense training. Rolf is terrible for efficiency, and Wendy gives me great reason to question if her armor is made of paper mache. But having used all three, they're a blast! I like playing through 7 without Marcus, and 8 without Seth. I played Eliwood Hard mode only using girl units to fight; I had to beat FIVE CHAPTERS with just Rebecca, and it was absolute Hell; but very fun! It's okay to play how you want, it's okay to not be as efficient as humanly possible. But if that's how you enjoy playing it, that's cool too. Toss those three and Rebecca into the bench immediately, and smash Elibe with your army of horsies and flyers. The cool part about fire emblem, is that you can probably beat the game with just about any half-way competent strategy (and with an adult's sense of persistance, child-me). But, it's also important to read the room, and what's being discussed. Efficiency≠fun, and efficiency≠easiest. It's just another way to play. Efficient players want to discuss unit viability in a context of finishing the game with minimal resources spent, minimal training, and cutting out extraneous taskmastering. Seth is a God in 8 because he runs rickshaw with the whole game, but he still needs a little help to be truly efficient. Venessa for ferrying, Moulder for healing, and even some other units offering a hand to speed maps up until you get to Duessel, Cormag, or other combat units that can assist Seth. Other times, people are discussing who their favorite unit is. If someone says "Amelia", or "Meg"... Let them have that :3 They're fun to train, and they have neat character arcs and personalities. They don't need to be "lectured" on how useless they are in their respective games. If I wanna levin sword mage knight Anna in Engage, then I'm murdering every single window shopper in Elyos, god dammit :3 At the same time, efficiency players don't need to hear for the hundreth time how "Actually, Sophie is pwnage incarnate when you arena grind her for 100 turns with savestates"... Like- yeah. I hope she would be :3 It's alright to like bad efficiency. It's okay to only want to play with units that are great at efficient play, even if you yourself aren't that efficient, or if you are, or anyhow or anyway. Games are flexible, dawg. In conclusion, just be respectful. It's a video game at the end of the day :3
Extremely interesting video. I've been a Fire Emblem fan since I was a kid in 2005, but have only started following discussions of strategy & efficiency a few years ago, previously being someone who played the games primarily for the characters/story. The tips and strategies discussed by the efficiency crowd really helped me improve my skills at the game and being able to accomplish what I wanted to achieve, but I still never felt like the tier lists etc that the efficiency discussions landed on really represented a style of play that I enjoyed, and I agree with you that there's a slight undercurrent of "this is the superior way to play" in some of these conversations, although I also think this has lessened in recent years with more recognition of various playstyles. I kind of wish there were more discussion in the FE world that tiered and debated characters on the metric of how fun they are to use or "is this unit designed well" because it's self-evidently subjective but still involves material facts. For example, no one would say that Seth in FE8 is a bad unit by the metric of most standard tier lists, but there's a fair argument that he makes the game less enjoyable because he's so superior to other characters that it reduces the player's fun of deciding which units they prefer to use. (Of course, this then becomes its own separate debate about game design and how to cater to players' preferences, so I don't think this kind of thing should be a dominant mode of unit discussion but I would like to see it brought up more because I personally find it an interesting conversation.) This is kind of a side note, but I've always found it odd that support grinding in GBA FE seems universally regarded as non-efficient or as "cheesy" in the same way as arena abuse / optional battles / boss abuse, since by comparison to those strategies it's extremely easy to do and relatively fast, requiring little effort or thought from the player and only wasting turns while pressing up+a in order to achieve a stat bonus. I would expect that if you factor in the real-time effort (as a decent number of respondents to your survey seemed to do), rather than purely turn count, it could be considered relatively efficient depending on what support you want. Is it because it's too easy, or seems exploitative against the game's intentions of how you should play it? I would be interested to see a debate which did the math on the efficiency value of support grinding if one doesn't consider it to be banned, which would require people to be definitive about how much they value low turns over low time spent (i.e., to me the turn number going up doesn't feel like it makes much difference if nothing happened on the turn and all of the enemies are already cleared)
In respect to the idea of different ways of playing. Regular, Est, and Jaigen type characters should be separated. Est being later recruitment, high growth. Jagens being pre-promoted classes with high base statistics but low growths. Perhaps different classifications could also be separated since they are not the same thing. Tanks, damage deals, healers, supports(which includes dancers etc.) A player phase build would look something like level 10 mage for +2 magic, Focus(+10% critical hit when units are 3 spaces or more away from allies), level 15 into Sage for +5 to Tome damage, 5 levels into Grandmaster for Ignis(+half your strength or magic). When I make my tier lists I take the single best damage dealer, tank, healer, and support if there is one and only those units make it into the top tier.
If you want to see some discussion on unit design and how fun they are, check out Professor Bopper and Mekkah's videos on "unit feel". They talk about things like how earlygame cavaliers, despite being good often feel bad because they're often not exceptional in any way, notoriously bad units that are fun to train, and how sometimes it's just fun to run a game over with an earlygame prepromote. It's the framework for discussion that I personally enjoy the most because it takes a step back and examines what makes the game fun in the first place.
For support grinding, it probably counts as non-efficient or cheesy as arena abuse simply because the games used to record your turn count and grade you for it. So any chapter turncount that exceeds double digits are seen as "inefficient".
It's really interesting because ever since starting my channel, I've almost exclusively stuck to the Fates community, and for whatever reason (maybe it's Zoran's wonderful skill builds, maybe it's just the lack of foot traffic in the 3ds world, or some other reason I can't comprehend), we've really managed to sort of de-emphasize turn count and real time speed as the be-all end-all. There are absolutely holdouts who prefer the raw turn-based efficiency context and runs that care about those metrics above all else, but it's really a surprising thing we've been able to do. Not saying the Fates community is a monolith, far from it, but we really see weird and wild contexts all the time and we just roll with it. I've definitely been guilty of trying to overcorrect for the overcentralized effficiency-based value judgements the community has seemed to land on, but my goal has always been to make it easier and more welcoming for new people to get into Fates, and I just wanted to take this moment to thank my community for being so awesome. I can't think of another place where I could go, drop the world's most ludicrous run concept and see like half a dozen people genuinely engage with it and theorycraft with me about the value of ideas, strategies, builds, and units. I see a lot of newcomers just having an absolute blast playing Fates for their first time and having a reliable backbone of a community to fall back on whenever they need some help that's willing to tell them to go further in their insane theories and frankly criminal skill builds, and I really hope that one day the FE community as a whole could buck the somewhat negative reputation we have and move past this conflict.
it may be in part how hard a game conquest is.People might generally be more focused on figuring out ways to make their runs less painful before being more efficient.
CQ and Rev are hard as fuck games. Prioritizing turn count in a game with no way to rig the RNG would require so many resets. Such a high roll isn't worth it. I think that because of this Fates players have mostly adopted the "reliable LTC" mind set.
I have been attempting to push my builds in Fire Emblem Awakening further lately. I tried a Male Robin +magic/-strength Maribelle pair-up to turn Morrigan into a monster mage in Normal. I tried a +speed/-skill Male Robin, Fredrick, Tharja playthrough in Lunatic which resulted in a scuffed ending where I needed critical hits to finish Grima. I did a +speed/-skill Male Robin, Morrigan, Cordelia Lunatic+ run which seemed below par for that course. Maybe Cordelia with green statistics would have changed it from a scuffed victory to a solid one. I only mentioned the main characters I trained not the secondary healers/supports which were trained in all of these examples. Personally, it feels like if Chrom and Robin were not both loss conditions, there would be more viable options. Then again you need to train a Lord for the end anyway.
@@ScubaLuigi I think that might be close to hitting on the reason. The Fates games, especially Conquest, are some of the few in the series where actually beating the game at all is in question if you aren't experienced with them. For other Fire Emblem games, it's a given that the average player will be able to beat the game, so the community turned to arguing about "but how do you beat the game WELL?" In Fates, especially Conquest, people often seek out advice on how to beat the game and what builds help with that.
If all you care about is actually beating maps, generals are quite a valuable class to have around, and I love the dichotomy behind people's considerations. And then there's tier lists, for which we as a community weirdly decide to take availability into account when comparing units against each other, rating "contribution" over "relative quality" which is just plain weird.
Tier lists are funny to me because I have FGC brain and when I see tier lists I think about characters purely in relation to each other in a vacuum, so when I see things like Alcryst so low on Engage tier lists, I'm like wtf?? His personal skill sucks but his unique class skill is broken, procs almost every combat and if you're using a brave bow can easily proc 3-4 times, letting him melt units who he'd otherwise do 0 damage to. Plus his spd and dex growths are excellent. Etie has nothing of that going for her, all she has is str, but I see people rate her higher than him quite a lot because, well, she's available from early on, if you keep using her her str *will* be enough to always do damage to even enemy armors (even if it's just chip damage,) and not using bow effectiveness before you get Alcryst is foolish and will cost you turns, so since you've already had to give Etie at least some exp, you might as well keep using her... Taking things like "how many of your limited resources in a speed/LTC run are you willing to spend on just *one* unit" into account is something I have to manually do. I get it once I think through it, but a lot of these things are just left unstated by a lot of people, or if not unstated, then underexplained. Interesting you talk about "actually beating maps" and generals being good. Back when there were more maps with actual or effective turn limits, their low Mov made them useless. But now I agree with you, since most maps are route or seize objectives with very few having a turn limit. I think in Engage there are, like, only a few maps where you actually really want whatever's in some chest a thief is making a beeline for, and there are basically zero green units on the main chapters you actually want/need to save. Plus, armors being immune to the break mechanic in Engage really suddenly made Knights and Generals finally good. But still, they're only situationally useful in LTCs so everyone still shits on them. Pretty sad.
@@drewbabeGenerals are stuck in an interesting spot. They give great defense in games where you can pair-up. They can have enough defense where getting doubled does not kill in certain cases. Even before the ability Pavice or Aegis is added. Of course their resistance is lower than defense. It is an extreme example of physical defense.
Generals are also great if one wishes to use strategies that limit how much one can get RNG screwed during match-ups; unless its against a magician or a special weapon, a critical is unlikely to kill a general, and you don't have to worry about dodging. Why take unnecessary risks just to save a few turns, and why stick with a mediocre pre-promote in the last third of the game when generals make training un-promoted units that much easier?
I think the best points made in this video were the focus on the lack of a true definition for what “efficiency” actually is in a given context, as well as the related idea that unit discussion is only useful if everybody is operating under the same lens. While something like turn count is a nice ideal in theory, it is also kind of problematic to put into practice for tier lists, as units who might otherwise be not very useful can suddenly find themselves at the top of the list due to a forced deployment with limited slots. FE10 Edward is probably the poster boy for this type of oddity. In a similar vein, time efficiency sounds nice due to giving more credence to strategies with high reliability and ease of use, though it has the possibly unintended knock on effect of encouraging gameplay which many might consider boring. It is incredibly easy for FE7 Oswin or Hector to near solo the game with minimal consideration on the part of the player, and while time efficient this certainly isn’t very exciting. This isn’t meant to discredit either of those standards of efficiency, it just leads me to the actual point of my comment which agrees with the broader point of your video that clear standards need to be established at the beginning of any unit discussion post. Personally, I actually think the “vibes” definition that dips a little bit into the pool of both turn count and time efficiency is actually the most intuitive despite being the least objective. However, because it’s the least objective it isn’t particularly well suited for a strict tier list, so something like a character guide or unit by unit analysis is my preferred method of discussion for this topic in general. The vast majority of players do not care one iota about “efficiency”, and even the ones who say that they do often do not actually behave in such a way when they actually go and play the games themselves. It is much more helpful to discuss on a per-unit basis what they can do when given investment, and how much effort on the part of the player it takes to get them to that point, hence my preference for character guides. Lots of rambling aside, the main point is that better communication by OPs is the biggest thing that needs to “change” in the community; as everyone will always have their own definition on what skilled play looks like, the best we can strive for is to make it clear which definition any given poster is talking about.
As someone who plays semi-efficient runs, I understand efficiency as "clearing the game with the least amount of unnecesary effort possible", which usually means relying the least possible on growth reliant units and not being afraid to use pre-promotes, specially in the late game, where underleved growth units are usually a pain in the butt to grind.
I’ve had the same stance on this since then and I’ll say it now discussing character viability is a lot easier than discussing an entire run with that particular character in use. We seriously need unit averages back lmao
When I first got into Fire Emblem back in the GBA days, the community consensus was that characters like Nino were top tier while characters like Marcus were trash. After about a decade, the consensus was the complete opposite. I've learned 2 things from watching the discussion change over time. 1. Most people are just parroting the opinions of other people. 2. Unit tier lists are pretty irrelevant to most playthrus, so just use the units you enjoy.
I've scarcely had any interactions with the FE community, but this unending conversation around "efficiency" is what I'd've expected were I to participate in it. It's understandable, given that it's a tactical RPG notable for its difficulty. By necessity, people will try to figure out the optimal ways to approach the challenges therein. It seems people lose each other in the discussion when they either expect the experiences of other players to match their own, or lack the context of why strategies or arguments are presented as such. I'm not immune from this, I feel a gut-reaction to defend my boy Clanne whenever I saw him towards the bottom of most of the tier lists/character rankings presented in this video, but the fact that he carried me through my Normal difficulty playthrough doesn't mean much in the context of LTC runs or speedruns or whatever (it also doesn't help that I'm inherently against most tier lists, but that's a topic for another day). As you said towards the end of the video, it's important for context to be heeded when discussions like these arise. That example of the player who got flak for reclassing their Ivy was particularly frustrating to me, since I've seen similar attitudes towards 'non-standard' or 'inefficient' play in other communities I'm in. I feel like it does more to stifle creativity and innovation if everyone is expected to play the same way.
This video has made me realize that the reason I don't like meta discussions is because the people arguing are usually just shouting right past each other. Also I wouldn't call myself an efficient player per say, so I get sort of put off when entering a discussion cause I get very "this is the REAL way to play" vibes from other people a lot of the time.
I'd like to clarify my clarification at 28:55 in the second long form response. I'm fine with discussing effeciency under any lens any person wants to use. I enjoy discussing IL LTCs. Unfortunately, as you address later in the video many people do not explicate what they mean by "effecient" and only talk about what they personally did to beat the game. This means that on the whole "effeciency" as a monolithic concept is not defined. As another long form responder mentioned later in the video said; the closest definition of "efficient" is "minimum input for maximum output" which is what I meant by the Platonic ideal of "effeciency". I enjoyed the video. You speak very clearly and are good with data. I'd enjoy seeing more data analysis and op eds from you.
As a Fire Emblem fan who frequently interacts with the Fire Emblem community; I do not talk about Fire Emblem. Ever. I do not give opinions, I do not offer my experience, I do not say what units I do or do not use. It's not worth it. Being in the FE community means a silent agreement to never be a part of it.
Yup same, especially if it's because I got stat blessed. Like I used Etie in Engage and never really had troubles with speed, but mentioning that she was one of my best units online would be like putting my hand in a bear trap
From my perspective, discussion that revolves around what's "best" while dismissing everything else as unusable is not only short-sighted but also simple-minded, and i would even go as far as to say that anyone who has to rely on what's "best" to beat Fire Emblem isn't as good at the game as they think they are. Like if i want to have a discussion about how to make Etie work, and people just respond with "Alcryst/Amber is better", that's simply being unproductive. Like it's great if that's your opinion and all, but you're not adding anything of value to the discussion i'm trying to have. Just like that Ivy post shown in the video where the responses boiled down to "Lindwurm is best and nothing else is relevant". I think this video also touched on what i've found to be the fundamental flaw of FE tier lists: ranking units based on an arbitrary metric (that usually isn't even clearly defined), and then deeming that because other units are worse at that particular thing they are worse _overall._ They overly focus on specific attributes or particular playstyles and then seek to imply that those are therefore the best attributes and playstyles. Like arguing that Kagetsu is better than Louis because Kagetsu can easily hit ORKO thresholds while completely ignoring that Louis simply laughs at all incoming physical dmg. I absolutely agree that FE discussion would greatly improve if it revolved less around unit comparison and more around in-depth analysis of units individually.
Honestly about the part with seeing High Level Players Skills - Isn't it far more impressive to beat a game with the "worst" units rather than the best of the best? This term feels contradictary. Because yes, when comparing and tiering units the question of which units are the best should ve questioned. But just because someone uses a Jagen and a cast only made of very good unit doesnt automatically make them good players.
I'll say that there's definitely game knowledge being expressed when solving the puzzle that is "which strategies could I deploy to get some 'best' result?" Now, this doesn't (or at least, shouldn't) make someone a "better" player for executing the strategy. Like you referenced, players can also demonstrate game knowledge/skill when putting together strategies that don't achieve the same 'best' result, either due to using various restrictions, or even just having different goals entirely. Solving one type of puzzle doesn't necessarily make one person smarter than someone who solves a different type of puzzle. In some cases it could, but players shouldn't be so quick to label just a couple playstyles as "high level gameplay".
@@queenlyarts Ye it definitly is a good thing if you can figure these things out - but one compenent of that process involves either trying out every single unit over multiple runs or googling their growths and combining the knowledge gained. Making "Spoilers" the best way to play the games because especially those who dont research all that stuff wil l most likely fall in the category of those who achieved good results but are bad because they benched Jagen and used Myrmidon 1 over Myrmidon 2. I wonder what 99% of the people discussing this did. And no, I dont think its a bad thing to look up ingame information to rate units. It is ik fact nessecary. But I've never seen someone adressing this because, like discussions themselves, it has become a Standard. Meaning among those who get called bad are people who didnt even know these factors are a thing. They will quickly learn them but, like the Jagen pitfall, it could impact their grow as a player into a false direction due to others saying that characters A/B are objectively bad and not possible to make good (or at least make it sound that way) Great video btw! I personally like the idea of Mekkahs unit stonks because it allows you to take growth averages and ressources into account and to take a deeper look into units performance
I think a key part of understanding why efficiency came to be so prominent is that it was used as a razor in unit tier lists. Because games often allow for degenerate strategies such as unlimited grinding, most units can reach max level and reach any benchmark. So, a standard is needed to better distinguish good and bad units, which came to be efficiency. While ETC calculations may be "complex" to a lot of people, it is an intuitive enough metric that you can usually guesstimate where things are. You only really need to whip out the calculations if there's a serious disagreement.
I think that avoiding degenerate strategies isn't a global standard either. If you are doing an Iron Man run for example and one of your main contributors dies, using an exploit or degenerate strategy to recover from that mistake is fair game, skillful, "efficient" even. So in this context knowing which units are more easily exploitable is much more important than knowing which ones save me turns or resources. I guess all of these concepts are nebulous and no definition of efficiency nor any part of it can be really universally applicable to most of the common goals of a Fire Emblem run.
@@SeleccionMakiliI think you misunderstood my point. If you for example boss grind a unit to max EXP, well most units grinded to max EXP perform fairly well. There rarely are units that can't be grinded up, especially at the time efficiency became the dominant metric. Accounting for such strategies tends to level all units to the same floor and makes discussion pointless. Not all ironman runs consider degenerate strategies as acceptable. It will depend on the runner.
I've always found it weird how the efficiency people don't consider real time and/or cognitive load as part of efficiency. Like if a grind takes 5 minutes and 100 turns, characters that get access to said grind would be way better than characters who don't.
Great Video! This whole topic is honestly the biggest reason I'm not that involved with the community, as efficiency is such an extremely subjective topic, especially in a game with so many variables as Fire Emblem. There is no "standard" unless you go for LTC and speedruns. To me efficiency isn't a show of skill. True Fire Emblem skill is how you handle an almost guaranteed loss. I once played a FE8 hack and was extremely underleveled for the final boss and strategized for like 2 hours to figure out how to do it without losing a unit. It's the most accomplished I ever felt playing FE. Playing efficiently never made me feel skilled. It's just looking up strategies others made and follow them, maybe figure a few things you can improve, and that's it. But in the end, it's just about what you have most fun with, just don't be a dick about it. Nobody should care this much how others view or play the games.
Yeah, this is most fundamentally a language problem. I don't think anyone would have an issue with pretty much any of this if they were just called Reliable LTCs. It's pretty much the claiming of the word efficient in a strategy game while only adhering to a very narrow interpretation of the word. Within that subcategory of FE play there will still be some stuff up for debate on what reliable really means and how to measure it, but that I think is a purely internal issue to work out. How it feeds into other issues like character strength discussions or tier lists, or questionably presented topics like "pitfalls" that often apply to other types of play is its own can of worms, so I wont really bother with that stuff.
I basically wrote this comment out as I watched the video, and obviously a lot of the things I touch on will be points of disagreement, those are the main things to reply to and sitting there typing "I agree", but I don't want the tone of this comment to be completely negative, so I want to start out by saying this is really well made, I think you articulate and deliver your points and arguments really well, the editing was really clean, and I think in general the topic of discussion was a really interesting one which is always great to get more perspective on. I think you should be really proud of this video, and I hope it kickstarts some much deserved growth for your channel. I am absolutely interested in seeing more long form discussion videos from you. Stellar job, and genuinely well done. This is excellent content. -- This topic is one I find really interesting, and have discussed a couple of times myself. Before watching, I want to preface by saying that whilst I enjoy and value efficiency as a metric, and it's one I have used myself in the past, I also find it quite odd how dominant it's become in terms of where discussion has gone surrounding Fire Emblem units. There are a lot of different metrics from which to discuss the viability of units, but anything that isn't efficiency seems incredibly rare. I'm initially confused by the example of "Bad discussion" around the units at around the 0:40 second mark. They seem to be a lot of well articulated and polite discussion, apart from the one guy calling people "Elitists" in the Amelia example. As far as I see it, polite, well informed and well articulated discussion from varying viewpoints regarding gameplay mechanics is almost the pinnacle of what any video game discussion could really hope to reach, especially for single player strategy RPGs. I'm not at all denying that the discussions can get toxic - they absolutely can - but I don't think the examples you picked really showcase that. I think there is a bit of a misconception being made here that playing for efficiency = thinking you are more skilled, which personally, I don't think a lot of efficiency oriented players have a mindest of. It's just the way they like to play and/or discuss the game. Really like that you break down Efficiency into different sub categories, and that even outside of these, everyone has their own definitions. I disagree with "High Level" gameplay exclusive meaning efficiency - I feel like it is mostly used to reference those who are very well versed or skilled in any particular playstyle - whether that be efficiency or otherwise (Ironmans, 0% Growths, etc). This survey is really cool, really nice set of data to have, and think you asked some very interesting questions. One thing I *massively* agree with you on is that we all need to do a much better job of defining and framing the context of the discussions we have. One of the comments for that "Ivy" example seems to just be answering the prompt of the question and I'm not quite sure why it was showcased. The thread asked what people did with Ivy and they just answered. I think that a lot of people who discuss the games from an efficiency perspective get branded as "Trying to tell other people how to play" when they... aren't, they are just discussing their own method of playing, and a lot of that gets showcased in this video. 40:51 - Could not agree more and is something I have been actively pushing to try and do, with discussions that avoid unit comparison entirely with the "Breaking Down" series for FE3H. Discussing a units strategies, use cases, and 'builds' doesn't require comparison to other units, and is something I have personally really enjoyed. Banger video, love it, keep it up.
Thank you! I'll admit that some of examples don't read as clearly supporting my arguments, and that's largely because of my takeaway that words have meaning beyond what is directly said. I spent a lot of time reading through posts from the past, posts made within the last couple weeks, and all hundred or so free responses from my survey. I basically had something to say about every comment I read, but for the sake of making a concise video (albeit still pretty long at 45 minutes), I had to just kind of categorize the posts under the broad takeaways that I had, and present them when discussing that takeaway. Each post deserves its own analysis in my opinion, but that's obviously not feasible. I also have the bias of knowing what I mean when I present a post to support a claim, so I don't blame you for the critique. My thought process for "efficiency = skilled" being the standard has two points. For one, some players overtly refer to efficiency as high level gameplay, either in that specific term or in using phrases that have the same implication. The other point is that with efficiency being the standard metric for most discussions, players who come into discussions with other metrics in mind are told that "they can play however you want" and "don't let this stop you from having fun". These are nice thoughts, but they imply that playing outside an efficient context, or wanting to use other metrics for discussions, would be for fun rather than an expression of skill. I don't think this means we should say players aren't skilled for achieving their goal of efficiency, but rather that we should give more opportunities for players to be recognized for expressing skill in contexts that don't have a strict measurement for success. One way of being more inclusive in this manner would be different formats for gameplay discussion, which I appreciate you recognizing and actively encouraging. Of course, this is largely just my interpretation, but I think it's worth considering looking past what is directly said. Communication is really tricky in online spaces, after all.
Unfortunately, you are unlikely to find much conversation which falls into the category of your ideals. What you are talking about is the topic of discussion exceeding that of meta and moving into what I call high meta. In every game I have found getting to the level of high meta to be a daunting task. Those in the community cannot handle non-standard discussion so this results in me eventually giving up on a community and moving to another. If you want the conversation you are looking for you need to be willing to continuously respond to an individual to allow the discussion to progress in level. Too many just see the discussion is not up to their standards/not to their liking and move on.
Fantastically put together video on a topic that a lot of people fail to talk about in as much depth as it deserves seeing how fundamental it is to so many discussions in the community. I look forward to seeing what you put out next!
Interesting! I'm working on a Fire Emblem video right now myself, and this video definitely has me thinking about how I might frame the language of my writing a bit differently. I agree that making efforts to keep discussions more inclusive is an important aspect of fostering a good community. Thanks for the valuable insights!
Pretty good video. I don't agree with everything, but I think there's something for everyone to take away from this video, agree or disagree. I do think there's definite value in tiering units, and that efficiency is the most sensible way to do so; it was never done because it's the most "valid" way to play, but because it's a way to rank units without the issue of factoring in grinding, because grinding makes all units overpowered, and at that point the lists become even more lopsided. When I joined the community back when Awakening was new, I received the same kind of stifling tiering discussion in the other direction, being told things like how Olivia is the optimal partner for Chrom due to being the best way to pass Galeforce to Lucina, never mind the enormous wall of grinding needed to do so. Tiering is not meant to demean, and using a bad unit doesn't make you less skilled, much like how using a top tier in a fighting game doesn't make you better. It's just the most efficient way to tackle the specific type of play the tier list covers. So uh...yeah, like you said, just don't be a dick lmao
This video came off as really soapboxy to me since I personally view the issue as not existent, but I will say that unit analysis videos are really fun. JonoabboFE's 3 Houses videos are pretty good since they highlight what a unit is particularly good at while also not having an issue pointing out their glaring flaws.
Great vid, totally identify with a lot of this. Often times i dont even bother participating in discussions anymore bc my strategies are almost always not the meta, and it just makes me feel like im bad FE and not as skilled despite beating the game on the same difficulty as others.
Same. The only game where you need to find the right units and the right class for those units is Three Houses, but the rest of the games are honestly pretty lax with what units you use or how many you keep or lose. I lost Shiida almost immediately in my Hard*5 Shadow Dragon playthrough, yet I beat the game.
@@michaellane4054I tried to play Shadow Dragon managing to beat the game on normal, t1, t2,, t3, and I got into late game in T4. After trying to crunch numbers I realized that Barst has similar potential to Sedgar and...the other broken growth character. Though, due to his recruitment chapter, base statistics, growths, all factors fit one definition of the best character in the game. I unfortunately gave up trying since my attempts were not going anywhere.
Enjoying efficient play and discussing efficient play being positively correlated makes sense. However, I'm surprised to see that those who didn't enjoy playing efficiently tended not to view efficiency as a form of skill. I don't like playing LTCs, but even I view LTC efficiency as reliant on game knowledge and decision-making, both of which I view as skill for an FE game. Beyond that, you're right to say efficiency is goal-based, so it makes sense that people's views on efficiency will differ. Mindful clarity is not everyone's strong point, so I don't expect vague or presumptuous value statements to stop popping up, but I do hope to see it have some impact.
Yeah I included the enjoy playing vs. discussing comparison because the basic graphs for each weren't really informative on their own, and now we at least have some data that supports the correlation, as simple of an observation it may be. As for viewing efficiency as a form a skill, I honestly hadn't thought about it the way you described until now. It makes sense that players would view their own playstyle as skilled, but I suppose that doesn't always mean the other way of thinking is true. As you mentioned, I think a lot of players, even those not interested in playing LTC, respect the effort that goes into LTC, but for some reason, this doesn't hold true for efficiency in this survey. My speculation is that some players responded negatively towards efficiency as a form of skill to state that it's not the *only* way of expressing skill. Then again, I also have seen comments/responses boiling down LTC to being more luck-reliant than skill-reliant, so I'm sure there's just a lot of variance as to the reasoning behind certain trends. Changing the behavior of a large online community is obviously very tricky, but I've at least read a few comments saying that this has made them reconsider how they'll talk in the future, so I know it's at least had a non-zero amount of impact.
I don’t like the whole stigma that playing efficiently is better. It feels like whenever discussion is had about character viability, it is always centered around efficiency. It is never stated in the game that playing faster is better (maybe tactician rank?) To me, the efficiency conversation sounds like. a group of people placing restrictions on themselves and believing they are better at the game because they can play within their pretense. It’s fine if that’s how you want to play the game, but don’t act like your way of playing the game is superior or more skillful than others.
I think one part of typical efficiency discussions that is strangely ignored is turns lost to resetting. Let’s use something like FE6 as a reference for example. Which is more efficient: (A) Spending 30 extra turns at the end of a chapter to grind supports for Lance and Allen so that they give each other a boost to hit rate. (B) Having to reset a later chapter 15 turns in because Lance missed on a crucial turn and died, and then having to reset another later chapter on turn 15 for the same reason. I’d personally count them both the same. I understand that the theoretical best run doesn’t need to waste turns grinding supports, but if all we ever care about is doing things “the best”, then why don’t we just rig the RNG? For me, the appeal of Fire Emblem is taking semi-random elements and board states and having to figure out safe ways to make progress (i.e. completing chapters, achieving side objectives, strengthening units). If we get too bogged down in which strategies might work to save a handful of turns throughout the game if I brute force this 80% chance to hit and that 30% chance to dodge, then I think that loses a lot of what makes the game interesting.
Great Video, you've earned yourself a sub 🎉🎉🎉 I will preface this by saying however - I am a causal player. I play for fun and don't "care" about efficient play. I routinely grind supportd and use objectively bad characters because I like to. But I personally uphold efficient play for various reasons. Firstly, "Efficiency" is defined as how close you are to maximizing one's resources (Be it deployment slots, turns, items, experience, or real life time) while minimizing costs and wastage. That is an objective definition. Because the broad goal of all playthroughs is to "beat the game" (whether LTC, 0% growths, Iron Man, etc), efficiency in this context always broadly refers to "beating the game" with minimal wastage of resources. Yes, an iron man will change the fundamentals of how you approach the game and what is or isn't "efficient" given you have narrower parameters to work with, but the actual definition of "efficient" doesn't change. In almost every playthrough, Nino requiring tons of training, slowing your army down, and realistically never reaching Pent's A rank Staves in lieu of the effort used is inefficient. There is not a single scenario Nino being used is "efficient" use of resources, even if you have the resources to train her. Lyn being unable to retaliate at 1-2 range makes her objectively inefficient at clearing groups of enemies with 1-2 range compared to someone with weaker offense but the ability to retaliate at 1-2 range. These are objective metrics that cannot be spun, because she not only clears the group of enemies slower, she by definition, clears the map slower and thus the game slower. As for the case against grinding, firstly, not only it is "inefficient" in terms of real time and turn count, equalizing the playing field has the effect of making everyone good. At that point, virtually everyone can "efficiently" beat the game (save for bow and sword locked units). If a unit could do the same thing as a heavily grinded unit can do after said grinding, then that unit performs more efficiently in all contexts, with or without grinding. In fact, grinding only proves the point because it demonstrates that everyone can crush when trained infinitely, but not the reverse. Hardest difficulty assumed is where we get contentious. Much like LTC, Speedrun, or 0% growths, I see game mode difficulty as just a set of parameters the player has to work with. I.e. what is "efficient" in Normal vs Hard isn't always the same, just like how Ironman vs 0% growths may favour different units. The common linkage is you're still trying to beat the game, but the constraints placed become different. I.e. Rutger is notably better in Hard Mode because his overkill offense is necessary for efficient play in a player-phase game mode like FE6 Hard. In Normal Mode, he comparatively is worse off because the benefits he brings to the table are not as unique or necessary. However, in both modes using him is a more efficient allocation of resources than Fir, who requires more training and joins at a point in the game where overkill offense becomes less important for efficient play. I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts! And yes - I am actually a casual, save state abusing player. But I respect efficiency as an objective standard and metric for the aforementioned reasons.
I want to add that efficiency does, in fact, demonstrate skill, because it requires significant game knowledge to maximize resources and minimize costs. Efficient play is not inherent, it's a skill that must be learned. I am not saying that grinding a weak unit up and taking effort to shield them from harm doesn't take skill - it absolutely does, but the degree of skill expression needed are not the same. Efficient play also requires the same skills of protecting weaker units, or covering the weaknesses of flier units, etc. In addition to resource maximization and cost minimization. In other words, an efficient player is likely to be able to turtle and grind a weak unit up, but a casual player is unlikely to be able to play efficiently without Developing a mindset for it. Most people would agree hitting the load save state button everytime a unit dies in the arena or elsewhere takes no skill. People agree that checking enemy ranges and calculating damage and making educated decisions demonstrates basic understanding of FE Mechanics. So now we need something to differentiate. Different playstyles and player attitudes are fine and should be respected, but it doesn't make the difficulty of each the same. Some playstyles require more game knowledge, planning, and experience to pull off. And efficient play requires more skill than grinding a weak unit, which in turn takes more skill than loading a save state every time your unit dies. They're not the same. I feel as if it does a disservice to people who have actually put in the time to learn the games mechanics at a high level to equate the them.
@@marktam4983Playing efficiently demonstrates the opposite as well. There is merit to running the best as they are the best and having such game knowledge, but it in turn makes the game significantly easier. It's the same effect as playing very slow and safe. More skill is demonstrated by using lesser optimal strats. Skilled players can do more than meta-gamed fast strats or turtle paced ironmans. It's part of the problem with the community promoting the idea of those kind of challenge runs, it's skip the actual stage of experimenting very heavily and learning a lot about the game. But personally I think skills a bad way to look at it anyway. More so being really good at fire emblem is more about familiarity with the series and specific game.
@@coldeed I would argue that minmaxing the game does require tedious experimentation to best come up with strategies to efficiently beat the game, however. We tend to only see the outcome of LTC/Efficient play, rather than the planning that goes into it, which demonstrates skill itself. Don't get me wrong however, I am pretty sure some LTCers/Efficiency -First players would be flustered with some maps if the restriction of no Warp Staff or no Flier utility was tacked on. So in that instance i would agree that "Efficient" play has compromised their ability to employ other strategies. In all honesty, however, skill in Fire Emblem is pretty hard to measure. Given the time-insensitive, the static PVE nature of the game, and the ability to soft reset or load a savestate, plenty of weaknesses can be covered up with real life time. I would personally propose a definition of measuring fire emblem skill as being able to optimally respond to situations that the player has not encountered before, without consulting pre-existing strategies that are shown to be highly effective, thereby placing the burden on the player to use their understanding of base fire emblem mechanics to come up with an optimal strategy on the spot.
Nice video, I don't necesarrily agree with everything, but the common consensus of "don't be a dick" is something I do vibe with. Just curious because I can't recall, did that final hot take about talking about efficiency being inefficient come from me or am I dreaming. :')
Yes, that was coming from you! Thanks for the great response haha. I originally intended to put usernames next to their comments, but I ultimately decided against it, not wanting to put anyone on blast for representing problematic issues, and stuck with crediting everyone together at the end.
@@queenlyarts Good choice in the end, even though people tend to reply in good faith some submissions stood in stark contrast so adding usernames would probably have caused a bit of contention haha. Anyway, glad you liked it and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this, and more productive discussion!
Funny enough I am actually agree with the input output model you sort of critiqued towards the end of the video. My issue is how dishonest it's use has been. Input of investement to outout of performance is fine. The fact this may harm trainees isn't even an issue to me. But often in these discussions "performance" is poorly defined and then falls back on nebulous predictions of turn counts in their "golden run". This even though at times you could argue the output for player ease is better on one unit, but again when things get hard, turns are used as an easy way out.
What you described is actually exactly the point I was trying to get across! Looking back, I suppose I didn't make it the most clear that I was presenting the model as a good method of analysis, not critiquing it. When I said "this has not been the case" I was referencing that players are not upfront (dishonest) about its use case. If a player described a trainee's level of efficiency under this model, it could be legitimately argued to be accurate, but this shouldn't necessarily speak to anything greater.
I think proficiency and LTCs are all well and good… but I’m always most impressed when players restrict their own resources. I.E. No Somniel chaplenge in Engage, No Recruit run of Echoes, Commoner only runs of Three Houses, Etc. Of course I think people should play however they want, with whatever units they want and just… enjoy the game :)
43:09 This chart is super interesting, and is eye-opening to me in explaining why I like Anna: I really enjoy using her in the "early-game 1-2 range Chain Attack filler" and "Radiant Bow Warrior" roles, both of which require the least investment. I'm not an LTC player and generally enjoy "zero to hero" units like Jean, but the roles I find Anna most useful in happen to be the easiest for her to fill, so her flaws aren't as notable to me as for someone with a different playstyle. As for WHY I like her in these roles, I just really like Chain Attacks, especially early in Maddening, and for Warrior it's just so FUN seeing her slice through Wyverns and Generals like butter. Other bow users can oneshot fliers and mages one-round generals, but Anna is one of the few who can do both at once without reclassing, the only other one who comes to mind is Fogado and he joins a lot later. It gives her a unique identity as a unit that I appreciate. (I do wish her Luck was better, since her personal skill is garbage despite being potentially useful in a game with limited gold)
To this day I find funny how grinding Seliph to promotion to pop off and destroy genealogy gen 2 is good and optimal but using Anna with Micaiah to heal and get her to lvl 10 to then pop off as an amazing combat unit is unrealistic and wrong
As a huge Genealogy fan I find it funny that people even want to trivialize the game that badly. Like, you can deploy every unit in the game anyway, who cares. My Seliph didn't even promote until like chapter 7 and it didn't really hinder me.
As someone who only plays on normal mode and likes to take my time with clearing each map, I don't even try to start discussions in the community because I know my opinions would immediately get shut down lol.
In conclusion, theres over 30+ characters I and many others can use throughout each game in the series. Each with their own quirks and personality. They're characters people can get attached to and be able to use in their playthrough. Besides the idea of Ninas or Amelias or the modern progidy unit is to give you a challenge of Zero to Hero as theyre arguably strong once they're trained and become staple once you make it to promotion. I think everyone can remember that feeling of finally leveling up a progidy unit enough to finally promote them and can now fend for themselves, its a wildly satisfying challenge to give a go. My biggest take away is that the wide character selection gives everyone a different experience. I mean imagine a madman telling you he had all three trainee units, Ross, Amelia, and Ewan trained up to their maximum potential without exploiting tower. Now that's cool. In conclusion, fuck you random redditor I'm using the Villager.
I don't find "optimally efficient" playthroughs fun. Unit builds trend toward homogeneity, research on chapters is favored over improvisation, and any unit requiring investment is benched. These undermine the fun for me, often under the premise that they are "objectively" better. But the objective for me is FUN -- so why would obey arbitrary rules that drain the fun from my play?
Eh, my take on this discussion is that it's really weird. People who talk about efficiency I feel are (usually) being taken way too seriously by the majority. Just because a person recognizes an efficient character, doesn't mean that they're saying you need to use them, or that you're even a bad player for using the bottom character. They simply display the data and state the takeaway. At the end of the day, it ain't that deep. "efficient play" is how you safely get from the prologue of any given game to the end of the final chapter with the lowest amount of risk and time spent. The fact that it's been proven that grinding is virtually never necessary (Except maybe 3H because it's sorta built around the training? That one's an anomaly) ,is why I think it's never taken into account when determining a unit's viability. As Mekkah has put it before, "Well if x character gets to grind, so does y character, and when everyone just gets to grind, then everybody is just at the same level, and there is no interesting discussion." At least that's what I've come to believe? That's what most tier lists and opinions are trying to say...and also the "elitists" usually are very chill people that don't actually adhere to the efficiency of a unit in their runs, most of the time they just enjoy the discussion. Casual players or semi-casual (Nothing wrong inherently with being these things) more often than not get up in arms though because the way they like to play the game isn't taken into account...when that's not what fits into the discussion. It's like being a lover of coffee and showing up to a tea convention to be mad that nobody there is talking about coffee.
The way I rate my units is measuring how easy they make the game to me and how easy it is for other units to take thier niche, beating them with the same build or otherwise (like how a facetank, nostank and avoidtank all do crowd control with different stats). If anything, my bias are towards reliable strats for Ironman runs. Thus I don't care wasting turns if that means earning more exp, wexp, or support points.
Efficiency and elitism are what plague the FE community. Like, I just wanna have fun using the characters I enjoy, playing at a difficulty I enjoy. I shouldn't be lectured or seen as less for doing that
LTC players: Play in a niche style barely anybody bothers to play. Also LTC players: Try to make all gameplay discussions revolve entirely around their niche playstyle. My personal goal is to just experience as much of a given game as I can. I go slow when I can and only rush when I have to. Support conversations were added to the game to encourage people taking their time to get to know the characters that interest them. As somebody who's been around since before "efficiency" was a thing in the community(mostly lurking silently), what people used to do most of the time in gameplay discussions was give advice for new players on approaches that would work safely(make sure to level up more than one unit, don't neglect your lords, stuff that isn't super fast to beat the game, but will get you through it eventually regardless). Then, as with a great many series their main version of speedrunning(in FE this was LTC) started growing in popularity, and fans of the style started squeezing out most other forms of gameplay discussion, saying turn efficiency was clearly the most objective measure of any given unit or strategy. Eventually this more or less squeezes out everyone but the top few players(based on popular perception) and their fans who agree with them. It happened in FE, it happened in KH, one by one it came for basically every series I hold dear, and now they're all at least semi-toxic cesspools that oft chase off would be community members before they've even said 3 things.
something that always strikes me with strategy people is that they forget that efficiency in other domains also often means minimal effort or energy. Specifically in fencing/fighting/martial arts you want to reduce the energy needed for the same results by improving your techniques and stances. In that regard spending dozens of minutes per turn can appear less efficient than someone who spends some more turns to make subsequent fights easier. Or in other words what makes grinding some levels less efficient than grinding your brain? I think you questioned the predominant ideas of efficiency well in this video.
So I have a lot to say on this topic of efficiency and how it has completely for a lack of tact FUCKED discussion, especially for my favorite game of all time Genealogy of the Holy War. In that game yes the maps are huge, but because of the current metrics of how fast a map needs to be completed (Which FE4 is not about) people are just like "Oh if you have a horse top of the list? No horse? Garbage" missing the complete nuance of FE4 that I actually discussed in a video long ago. Another thing that this efficiency discussion has kinda fucked over is that when a new game comes out for the series now nobody likes to experiment with units. We just apply the same mentality and then some units get unused, when really in my opinion for a first run you should TRY EVERYONE. Because who knows, you may find out that someone like Louis is actually a great unit despite your jugular about to burst and cause internal bleeding from me even suggesting that. Overall FE is a series about PERSONAL EXPERIENCE and not a "Correct" way to play.
I've noticed a few opinions on units did change in Engage as time went on and people experimented, e.g Etie is now considered about equal to Alcryst and Alfred is considered, while not amazing, not horrible anymore. (Partly because people knee-jerked that cavalry were bad in Engage, then realized how good Cavalry Bonded Shield is) But I totally agree on FE4. I personally think playing it fast is missing the point, but whenever I try to argue that I get hit with "BUT there's a turncount ranking!" And I'm just like... the turn limits for the best rank are pretty lenient from what I can tell. They definitely don't expect you to bench every foot unit.
@@BigKlingy Yeah they really don’t. I also will say, the ranking system was FEs worst mistake in my opinion. Because people turned it into gospel on how to play.
@@greatrieck It's funny because so few FE games have rankings, and "efficiency" players tend to hate FE7's ranking system because its Funds rank rewards hoarding powerful weapons, promotion items and stat boosters. My belief has always been: if I want to care about rankings, I'll play Advance Wars.
While watching speed runs in some games can be entertaining I have negative desire to actually attempt any speed running myself. Personally I love iron man runs in FE. Each death creates a void for a new character you never would have dreamed of using but you may end up loving because all you needed was to give them a chance.
Hey, I'm in the video (bottom response @24:30). Interesting that my actual position would probably be more Turns Efficiency. To expand on my point (now that I've thought about it more) I would say that a murky definition of efficiency better suits the qualitative discussion of a tier-list. For example, if one were to properly 'measure' efficiency (addressing the bottom point @37:04) in terms of turn count deltas, tier lists would simply become a record of who would and wouldn't be used (and to what extent) in the 'best' LTC (or ETC) strategies and playthroughs. This would render tier lists useless as a means of discussion for more general playthroughs, e.g. Kent would be E-tier in a no-LM HHM LTC FE7 play-through because you would never use him over Sain let alone Lowen, and he has minimal contributions in his join chapter. For this reason I prefer the murkier 'Fast Play' definition where to attempts to make all discussion extremely specific and objective, or to turn units into turn count deltas, are rejected, as it allows discussion of an imo more interesting topic, which is e.g. "What if you used Kent in a no-LM HHM FE7 playthrough instead of or in addition to Lowen, while not taking 30 turns on every map". However, as players gain more information about each game, further refine their strategies, and perfect LTC playthroughs, this sort of more objective discussion is perhaps inevitable. As for ETC, while I've been out of the tier list meta for about a year (haven't played engage, that SoV episode put me off Mekkah's tier list videos, playing Kaga Saga games which have barely any discussion online), reading up on all the threads I've seen it only discussed in the context of LHM as a proof-of-concept, despite it being 10 years old. I doubt anyone bringing ETC up as the 'current' means by which they rate 'efficient' tier lists has actually evaluated the exact ETC turn count of a single Engage play-through, let alone the multiple iterations that would be needed for a tier list; but maybe they're doing this in the discords that I'm not browsing.
I feel efficiency makes sense as a standard of discussion. Obviously not everyone is going to play that way, I don't play efficiency and generally prefer a slower playthrough training up my favorites, and I'm certain many others do as well. But it just makes sense that say, a unit that requires less investment and contributes in a meaningful way earlier on is better than a unit that joins later and doesn't contribute as much. Same with a unit that comes combat ready compared to a unit that needs a lot of investment before they snowball.
I do auxiliary maps to catch up lower level units and use a diverse array of classes because I find that more interesting. I was surprised when I first started watching FE content to learn that I guess all infantry but especially armors and archers are terrible. In my experience, almost every unit has been viable and most were actively useful, at least since I started playing with Awakening.
I've played every fire emblem released in the West except PoR (didnt know it existed until I was playing Radiant Dawn). Pre-promoted units are necessary for efficiency play, but I always figured they were just there to baby me until I got good at the game
Efficiency is a scam. People like to think that by virtue of beating maps fast they are better at the game but we live in an age where information is online so I can mirror any LTCer's run and achieve the same results with zero player knowledge if that entire playthrough is online. It is like theorycrafting MTG decks, once the good decks are theorycrafted, it becomes common knowledge within the meta what is good and why, and players simply need to mimic those decks to win. In the case of Fire Emblem, mirroring the best units/tactics that are known in the speedrun/LTC communities will drastically improve your outcome if not beat the maps for you. The lack of dynamic AI/responses to what the player is doing produces solved puzzles in a way where at some point skill evaporates and it just becomes an issue of applied knowledge to win positions. In Chess, knowledge can win games vs skill, as knowing opening traps your opponent does not know can let you LTC them. Skill is difficult to measure in strategy games, especially when AI does the same thing so anyone with knowledge can seem skilled. It isn't like observing a god in an FPS game who has clear mechanical skill that other players do not. You can kind of figure out how good someone is across multiple runs that have not been tested by observing their ability to theorycraft on the spot or produce winning positions rapidly, but ultimately none of these games are pvp/competitive and it is just a thing to do for fun for the people who want to LTC/Speed run.
Knowledge IS a form of skill. I don't think it's good to brush it off as being unskilled cause you're just repeating a sequence someone else figured out for you. But it's definitely not the only form of skill, and it's importance vary depending on the environnement. The focus on LTC or even speedrun as showcasing fire emblem skill ignores the different type of strategical skill you might need to beat the game blind for exemple (suddenly having a general that can hold a chokepoint and hold off 5 waves of unexpected reinforcement seems like a good idea if you don't know if that's on the table or not). Even something like crafting compelling character arc for the units in your party by adapting to what's happening in the game could be considered a form of skill, skill in an artistic expression rather than mechanical skill but it's still something not everyone will be able to do nonetheless and it tend to get devalued by the community as being more "casual" but someone can be just as invested in that as they are in the tactical aspect, it's a tactical roleplaying game after all, the roleplaying part has value too. It's weird that people can acknowledge that easily in a game like D&D but not in a game like fire emblem despite the game being designed to create such stories. Well I got a bit sidetracked but point is, I think any way to engage with an activity that involves learning and improving can be considered a skill and I wish we'd encourage a variety of ways of engaging with the game rather than devaluing the thing we don't personally engage with.
32:45 Hey, thats me! I’m the one in the blue that made the post about fe7-fe8 paladins, and I’d be curious in what way you would consider it overcorrection.
I meant to point out your comment as the interesting observation of overcorrection, not to say that you were the one overcorrecting, I apologize if that didn't read clearly! I agree that certain "bad" takes have been overcorrected, such as your example with early promoting. It may not have been great for players to push promoting at LV20, but saying that early promoting is the correct choice and that late promoting is "bad" is perhaps a bit much. You can certainly give advice as to which to do, but it really would just depend on the context.
The term new players is misused commonly in the Fire Emblem community among other communities. The term new player in the context which is being used means you still can not beat the game reliably, your completion still requires probability example(you need to dodge 2 times in x level or score 3 critical hits at specific times to complete x level). Someone who has beaten a game deserves to be regarded as a skill level of 2, while someone who has not completed a game regarded as a skill level of 1. The new player definition drags on being used to describe an exessively wide skill range of players to the point where the one using the term new player is being both illiterate and toxic at the same time.
Sounds like FE fans have a dandori issue where they don't know how to just go and smell the roses and enjoy the game at a slower pace. Honestly i think its lame if you use one class too much and only having one wyvern Lord in 3 houses for example will be far more fun as well as i might end up doing this with Engage one of these times to avoid saturation and homogenization. The standards for efficiency is really lame as a standard. If you can make a unit work who really cares beyond tierlists?
I really like this video and the way you elaborate on the points. A lot of it is indeed subjective but I do think we need to call a spade a spade every now and then. Take an example of Nino since it seems to be always the topical point. In an LTC scenario, nino is not very good. In a completionist run, nino is not very good (due to having to reset due to her dying). In a "relatively fast" playthrough, Nino is not very good due to taking time to grow. The only scenario in which nino is good is if you wanna cap stats and juggernaut, but it's more than proven that other units have this capability without as much investment. The ultimate point is , no matter how you judge it, nino is not very good. Failing to acknowledge that or ignore that is not us fostering a community that is more inclusive, but INHERENTLY allowing incorrect statements to be made to appease some individuals. The truth is: People have to grow some thick skin. A unit being deemed bad is not a personal attack on the person, but more of a statement regarding the units itself. There are always ways to salvage units and use them, but it doesn't necessarily derive them to "good". And if there isn't a metric that people can compare by or take into account, then what's the point of even discussing? If every unit is the best, then are any of them truly the best? All players being "equally wrong" is the same absolute statement you are trying to prevent to begin with. There are BETTER LTCer's within the community amongst themselves. There are better grinding players within the community. There are better completionist players. Albeit they're all different, there's no denying that within those (aformentioned) categories, the distinction of tiering characters still do exist and are very much based upon a logical approach to each different type of gamestyle with metrics set by the community. Albeit it's not a 12 page signed and sealed contract, agreements are implied within that playerbase without having to derive every little detail (such as if you're true LTCer for New Mystery, you don't really care if certain units have to die, even more so, you probably want that for optimal speed runs). You can't compare LTC to completionist, (unless it's a completionist LTC) or to an ironman player. But you can compare the ironman players amongst themselves and discuss why/where certain units may be better. If this wasn't the case, discourse would never exist, which is one of the most powerful things that I think exist and SHOULD BE PUSHED, not shunned, for the FE community. I do think each category has their own definition of what they define as efficient, and as you said in the video, doesn't necessarily apply to all. But having a defined set of rules for a sub category or a "reasoning" behind their thinking isn't necessarily a bad thing when trying to voice your opinion. For those being aggressive and mean or downright unwilling to listen to others or allow that discourse, there's no space for that IMO, but I do believe that being a firm believer in your decisions is nothing to be ashamed of, or to avoid saying. Your community representation research is fantastic and I think more of that should be done honestly! This part was very interesting to see. But I want to point at that, I'm not an LTC player. Even though I'm not, I can acknowledge that, ON AVERAGE, the LTC player will probably be a more knowledgeable player than if you don't LTC. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that other people are just better than you at something. I probably couldn't come up with some of the strats the LTCer's can. But it does ultimately come down to what enjoyment do you derive. If we only did things to be "the best" or "optimal" then only a few people would ever find satisfaction. So the statement "play how you like" is not quite a diss or disrespect, but is an actual, "derive enjoyment from what you want to do, but don't disregards actual information being presented (don't blindly accept it either)." The "efficiency" being a mindset is pretty much true.. and again. Nothing wrong with that. But there are general trends to what people deem efficient and not, so maybe defining that amongst each game or before a discussion will greatly help the discourse. Saying things like : "I used this unit against all odds and still succeeded" is not as much of a victory as you think it is. It's kind of a participation trophy award to be given a victory DESPITE using something deemed bad, not because of it. So no, I will disagree, i don't think we should encourage "using Anna as a true solo" ,unless you're into that kind of that, if your trying to justify a good unit. It's not even that I'm invalidating their experience. It is impressive to complete it, it's a monumental task. Does this make Anna good? No. So the statement of "It was a meme build" is an accurate one, and doesn't downplay the individual, but instead acknowledges the truth of what's being said. You're also kinda cherry picking what responses and what answers given on reddit (of all places) really define a discussion about a unit/class. There are plenty of reasonings as to why Donald can be considered bad or good. I'm not gonna sit here and enumerate them, but some people do fantastic jobs at explaining why they believe so and there are a ton of good discussion threads on it. Again, this is hearsay and I'm contributing to the issue ironically, but not every opinion read on the internet should be taken as absolute (including this one). But I think I see an issue with your complaints: People assume something before they're given all the information to make a conclusion. So... that's life unfortunately. If YOU don't set the standards as to what you want to have discussed or how you want this subject to be approached, people will jump with their conclusions and what they believe the metric is. Posting : Ivy's best class is Lindwurm, when all you said was: I really like Ivy in mage knight, isnt' an affront to your person, it's just a statement made by that individual. It doesn't invalidate your point, it's them setting a discourse for why THEY believe it is. If they do try to invalidate their point, the problem is that they suck and can't express their thoughts without undermining you, not that it's not a point worth expressing. Ultimately this is a fantastic video, Congratulations for all the hard work you put in. This is a massive undertaking and you should be proud. I know I sound harsh in the comments before but it's more me writing contemporaneously as I was watching. I do agree a lot of it is miscommunication and not setting clearly defined goals on what "the poster" believes is efficient. I do think the responsibility lies with the original poster though, and it's their job to define what they believe is or isn't efficient and some think skin needs to be grown for certain responses. People will disagree even if they're wrong and there are instances of things just being factually wrong in Fire Emblem... and that's ok. It doesn't invalidate their experience, but it does promote good growth and discussion within the community (as long as it's inclusive).
""I used this unit against all odds and still succeeded" is not as much of a victory as you think it is. It's kind of a participation trophy award..." Could you expand on that a little bit? When I played Engage I did a specific run that ignored a lot of stuff, and I thought the process itself was very fulfilling for me personally, and I thought it was a very good accomplishment in my eyes. I'm not taking insult at what you said, but I am open to hearing more what you mean about what you said. I'm just not sure if using "participation trophy" is right in this case. You mentioned setting the standard of how you want to be approached so I'll take initiative and mention what was part of the aforementioned Engage run: Maddening, used no one past Ch. 9 (Mauvier/Veyle excluded,) no Seadall, no inheriting Canter, and sticking to promotions that "made sense" according to proficiencies (only exception I remember was making Boucheron and Etie Warriors.)
So, what I mean by this is: Let's take Anna as an example. She requires a TON of investment to work. She's in the wrong class for starters, she's behind in level for every character you've had up to this point. Get's doubled by pretty much everything existent and doesn't kill anything without setup as well. (This is assuming Maddening, which I should specify). To get her out of this rut, you have to basically cater your play style to: Secure her kills, protect her, confer resources in the terms of an emblem ring (most likely micaiah so she can get faster level ups), a master seal and a second seal, all of which are highly coveted and aren't as abundant in that part of the game, for a unit that will hit benchmarks, that can be hit by other units with much less investment (as an example Chloe). To say that Anna is fantastic and that your experience in using her should be validated and you're a great player for it.. is a "participation trophy award". You succeeded DESPITE of Anna, not because of her. There's value in achieving that, but not "Anna is a great unit". What you effectively proved was: I'm good enough to succeed even with this difficulty added on (which is fine and totally cool, just not the praise that one was expecting to receive). Like I said, the reward received is usually misinterpreted. You wanna validate Anna, but what you're really doing is proving how much it took to get Anna to get there and why she's considered "not good" due to utilizing resources that otherwise could've been added to units that can perform that function with less investment. I want to clarify. THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE A BAD PLAYER. It's clear you know how to play the game by using Anna. But when people put the blinders on and just ignore the difficulties with using Anna or the comparison to other similar units, you're not encouraging a valid discourse, you're just catering to what you want to hear. But again, your run that ignored a lot of stuff and was fulfilling to you personally is totally cool and valid. I can, and never will, take away from that experience or diminish it because it's a very valid one and you should be proud in having to do it. What I do want people to notice is: even though you completed it, can you look back and see that maybe it could've been done a different way? Or altering some portions would've made some parts easier for another player? And so on so fourth. We have to be open to being wrong or understanding the limitations in our accomplishments as well. There's nothing wrong with that and it also promotes growth. @@HolyAarom
Thank you so much! I appreciate your responses to specific parts of my analysis. While I spend basically two weeks straight working on it, there's a lot to cover, and even more time would have been needed to completely straighten out any faulty arguments and make my main points read more clearly. I suppose one of my main issues is that terms like "good" or "bad" lose a lot of their meaning when used out of context. In an LTC or Reliable LTC, there are units that don't contribute anything to the fastest clear. In that case, I suppose "bad" means "doesn't contribute to the fastest clear under a certain metric". When making comparisons as to which unit is the most resource efficient, "bad" means the least resource efficient. When comparing Speed Growths, "bad" means a statistically lower growth rates. If there's nothing to measure though, then what does "good" or "bad" even mean? To some players, it could be a matter of their performance assuming that they get trained, and there are many goals that can still be achieved while giving these units a training arc, if desired. If someone wants to point out the shortcomings of a strategy or unit, then I just don't think a "good" or "bad" cuts it, and they should directly refer to a unit as "resource inefficient" or "doesn't have strong contributions to playthroughs attempting to be the fastest". In not specifying the context, certain players look foolish by saying "Anna is good" when the assumption is that good means "resource efficient" (or some combination of various contexts). I agree that there's room to "call a spade a spade" and have discussions that come to definitive conclusions without anyone getting hurt in the process. I think the hurt more so comes from players having their contributions to a discussion disregarded because what they were assuming to mean "good", "optimal", etc. doesn't match the majority interpretation for the term. This is why I say "both sides are equally wrong", because (sometimes) neither made their context clear. However, each side certainly has room to be "right" under their own context, if they provide accurate arguments. Players under a Reliable LTC usually do have good reasoning to demonstrate their points, I would just recommend that such players use more accurate wording to convey their conclusions. And yeah, as you mentioned, I believe players typically assume their conception of efficiency as the context for "good" or "bad". I don't wish to say these can't be contexts for discussions. Rather, by more clearly expressing a certain context, in addition to using a strict metric for success, discussions should be able to avoid miscommunications while still being making accurate comparisons (within their context). This is "exclusive" in restricting which players can take part in comparative discussions, but this is why I recommended opening up more formats for discussion that go beyond classic tier lists and comparisons about the "best" options. My unit performance chart is just one really, really rough idea, and I think there's a lot of room for new formats to develop. The issue is getting players on board with moving away from tier lists, etc. if they don't wish to have strict contexts. I can try to lead by example, but I think it'll have to be more than just me making a unit performance chart video or two to make it so that players "excluded" from comparative discussions have an alternatives avenue to channel their thoughts and ideas through. Hopefully that clarifies some of my thoughts. If you still disagree, that's fine! I just wanted to make sure that my arguments were clear.
@@queenlyarts totally in the clear and thanks for responding!!! Moving forward I’ll also Try to adhere (if I’m discussing units, not just as a quick comment) to your chart idea. I think more context is always fantastic for these types of showcases!!!
Nino is not the best example to illustrate the problem in the discourse. As you laid out, it is very hard to come up with a context in which Nino is not at least outclassed by other mages. My personal favorite examples of units that are valued very differently by players are the early game pegasus knight in the GBA games; Shanna in FE6, Florina in FE7 and Vanessa in FE8. From a efficiency perspective, those three are all S-tier units. They bring something to the table that no other unit you can get at that point provides, flyer utility. In the context of LTC, it is also optimal to rig their levels so they get needed stat gains, which turns them into flying Juggernauts very early and reliably. But once you lower the efficiency requirement, those units all become much worse. If you don't intend to skip parts of the map, flying utility becomes less necessary. Playing the map more slowly also means that you'll do more combat, and all three of the pegasus knights are pretty bad at combat when they join. HHM Florina without Lyn mode transfers is the worst of them, as she doesn't even double many enemies at base and deals pathetic damage. A "casual" player, who isn't going to just carry Seth/Marcus and the lord to the throne to kill the boss and seize, will look at a tier list that lists the pegasus knights as top tier, and will be very disappointed by their performance. Telling such a player that they "aren't playing the right way" is not a productive argument.
That's me at 12:10. I've come to realize that tier lists are a waste of time and nothing more than mental masturbation for people who have too much time on their hands. The notion of efficiency is a waste of people's time as well.
Where can i find that post with the detailed write up of all the units? I actually would like to read that. If they put that much effort into thier post then they have to have paid the game extensively.
Looking back, I realize I actually had saved two separate Engage tier lists with thorough write ups, and the one I included in the video is not that one made by the person who left a response indicating how they had made a well reasoned list that got a poor response. I'm incredibly sorry about this mix up. Here's the post that you expressed an interest in reading: www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/10zrzj8/unit_tier_listguide_after_3_maddening_playthroughs/?context=3 I would also recommend taking a look at the post I intended to show. It may be a bit late to fix my mistake, but hopefully you can still take away something from it: www.reddit.com/r/FEEngage/comments/14emaxq/5_maddening_run_tier_list_no_dlc_emblems_but_dlc/?context=3
22:56 I'm surprised at how high the percentage fo no deaths and full recruitment is. Yes, being able to keep every unit you use alive and reccruit every character no matter the difficulty does demonstrate skill, at least in my opinion, but can't it also be more efficient to skip out on certain units who won't help you, or sometimes make a conscious choice to let a unit go for the sake of the longevity of your run? Knowing when to let a unit go, when to prioritize your other units and such, that seems skillful to me. I don't know, I just find it very intriguing. This video all in all is very well put together and really gets my brain going. I hope we can spread it around the community a bit.
You are correct that sometimes recruiting a unit is more effort than the unit is mechanically worth, however your not considering the fact that most people also look at the units as characters who they like and want to get to know, its a bit hard to have to have a support conversation with a unit that you didn’t recruit or let stay die instead of reseting the map.
@@ninjakirby777 I thought we were talking strictly about efficient runs of fire emblem If we are talking about doing just straight normal runs then I'm not surprised at all - and I fall into the same crowd, which is recruiting everyone possible and keeping everyone alive, because it makes me feel better.
Hey I just wanted to stop by and say that you really had me sucked in with this video. This was fantastic, and you did a wonderful job framing the discussion both in history and how we can approach the conversations today!
Thank you! I closed the survey in case I ever want to look back at the results, but I created a copy for late submissions since you expressed an interest! forms.gle/6fA7RD1gmXajpZtaA
I feel like "efficiency" nowadays boils down to which unit build can kill the hardest bosses with multiple lifebars in one turn, and not being able to figure out how to do the same on your own means you're not a skilled player, and you should restart your run because you gave the wrong skill/statbooster/reclass item to the wrong character since chapter 1.
What I see here is that Fire Emblem players here in the West (since JP players have different views, focusing mostly on beating Endgame based on their views on FE8) are applying competitive point of view to a thoroughly non-competitive game. You know, since it’s single-player.
That's my biggest issue with how "skill" has always been measured in Fire Emblem fandom. Fire Emblem as a game is designed around the assumption that the player is going in blind, completely ignorant of what is to come. You're not supposed to know how many chapters or recruitable characters there are, or when they join if they join. You're not supposed to know any character's growth rates, or stat caps, or anything "under the hood". You're not supposed to know the contents of each treasure chest or village, so that the player has to weigh if the POTENTIAL reward is worth it. You're not supposed to know when is the best chapter to save X special weapon for. It's designed around the assumption that the player will accept the consequences of their mistakes and not save scum (rewind features aside, there could be a whole 'nother rant on why I don't like them), and that the player will accept the results of RNG and adapt accordingly. Reinforcements are SUPPOSED to blindside the player and be an unexpected wrench in their perfect plan. Large cast of characters are there specifically because the player is expected to lose characters by making mistakes or having no good answer to a fight. And on and on and on. So WHY is a style of play that assumes perfect prior knowledge of the game and removing as much RNG as possible, really just sidestepping as many "as designed" mechanics as possible, how we measure skill? It doesn't make sense. Wouldn't a better measure of real player skill be to play a version of Fire Emblem that preserves the blindness of a first playthrough by having each subsequent playthrough be a unique, generated campaign with novel maps, characters, etc.? Because you only ever REALLY play each Fire Emblem once. Once you've started a second playthrough, the player ignorance that the game relies on to really make everything work is gone.
@@7QWERTY13 Ok, you do make some good points, but I do wonder if any of that does excuse ambush spawns. Not trying to be confrontational, I am just curious.
@@azurethescaletipper210 Some implementation of reinforcements might be egregious (like when they spawn at the start of enemy phase rather than the end), but the intention behind reinforcements is good in principle: additional enemies have unexpectedly appeared, how will you adjust your strategy to deal with them?
@@7QWERTY13 Yeah, like if you pressed me for a definitive way to measure 'skill' in FE it would be being able to sightread a max difficulty ironman, not who can datamine and strategize the final chapter fight before booting up the game
I see quite a bit of issues, just early on talking about skill. It takes literally zero technical skill to play fire emblem, the commands and controls are simply and easy for most to enjoy. The two reasons for that is that nothing in this game is actually focused on your players ability to actively perform an action. This is a purely strategical game, with enough random elements in it that it's a very hard to talk about it requiring what I think is the more traditional definition of "skill". Strategies the right word to really use. Skill is to action what strategy is to thinking and decision making. But because of that kind of points out what's flawed about the idea of "time saving" in general. It's kind of a big downside when it comes to LTC and playing very fast. It takes very little degree of knowledge about the game. For just an offshoot example, I could bring up Sacred Stones and so long as you know who the character Seth is, you can likely accomplished top-end LTC results in that early game, as well as clear chapter after chapter incredibly quickly. But this is not to say that these are not things that stress some type of impressive strategy. But I'd say the four pillars to mastering a game of strategy are; Simplicity; which is probably the closest to what efficiency is typically. Doing something in the most pragmatic way that is the quickest to result in the favorable outcome without any care for overall investment or growth. Adaptability; being able to overcome different challenges that occur due to either randomness or misfortune Security; overall and optimization towards minimizing any types of expenses or consequences, such as very safe play Profit; the overall act of gaining more advantages do to resources being spend. Problem is displaying a high degree of confidence with any of these is going to make things look incredibly easy. Mostly because all of these are filled by knowledge and once you have knowledge it's rather difficult to lose it. I'm sure that some big fanboy of any form of play will try to run in then describe how their favorite way to play actually demonstrates all those but they typically don't. It's literally not possible to do things by minimum standards and focus on maximum improvement at the same time. Adaptability its self cannot be controlled. Through an essence effectively prove oneself incredibly good with strategy, you would have to firstly be isolated from the community and not be taking advice from others, need to specifically limit yourself to typically the worst and most restrictive options possible, attempt to do everything at as quick of a pace as you could, somehow also maximize "improvement", and get incredibly unlucky at the same time. Which my point more so with listing all that out is that it's impossible to do all those things at the same time. Several of these things are just completely out of your control, and multiple of them are genuinely at odds with one another in many different ways. And really call it your own skill it has to be something that you discover in the supposed organic way, because it's more reflective of how well your mind works then really how great you are at performing a task. Which is why it's really dumb that people are presented some kind of standard that literally is just the way that they used to write LTC strats. People that have told you that efficiency is not tied to ltc are likely very new in the community. Efficiencies just what makes a unit good for ltc runs. Is that the reason why first flyer that you get with the best availability is probably going to be one of your primo characters for receiving stat boosts. The character can afford to be very middle ground and not very good, as simply strengthening a flyer is very useful in a playthrough that you're focusing on turn count. But outside of that, it's just dumb to call it efficency. What makes something efficient or not is defined by the preset goal of what you're trying to achieve. Like if you want to save turns, of course I move and being able to move through any terrain is a really good feature. But if you're talking like doing a hardcore Ironman, survivability is going to be more valuable than time saving. If you actually want to make the game more challenging, using the worst units with no investments does the most actually boost the difficulty without modifying the game to be any harder. And even then the difficulty is inconsistent due to luck. Favorable outcomes can still screw you over, at no fault on the player.
The issue with Growth units and why I don't recommend to use them (at least in the mid/late game) is because they are usually a massive pain in the butt to grind, you have to baby them, to slow the pacing of your game, and give them tons of favoritism, just to make them catch up with the rest of your party. I say it as someone who grinded Nino in my first FE7 run, it took me more than 2 hours of absolute boredome grinding her, just to turn her into something with slightly better stats than Pent, but without Staff utility.
I applaud this effort and agree with your goals. I've read the comments in the Reddit thread and the consensus seems to be "gatekeeping good actually," which is thoroughly depressing. It just seems like people feel a need for a metric like this so they can know just how superior they are to others and just who they are able to exclude from their discussions.
@@thorscape3879 Can you provide an example? I can't think of any instance where gatekeeping is a good thing. It only benefits the gatekeepers, and not the community at large.
@@Arkholt2 I play a lot of card games and TTRPGs. Sometimes when you get a new player that are absolute dicks even on first meeting. I have done it multiple times and have will do it in the future. I've had to do it to long-standing members too. It is correct and good to tell such people to piss off and go away ASAP both for the health of the play group and the games. This is by definition gate keeping. Gate keeping is ethically neutral. It's applications can be morally judged though. More generically, banning people from message boards is also gate keeping.
@@thorscape3879 I don't think that's the generally accepted definition of gatekeeping. Wanting people to not be jerks is just a normal societal expectation. Gatekeeping is when communities set up arbitrary boundaries specifically meant to keep people they deem "undesirable" from participating in said community, such as video game communities trying to keep out people who don't conform to their playstyle or perceived level of skill. Basically, people who you could easily see fitting into the group are kept out because certain people in the group want to keep it exclusive. This only benefits the people keeping them out, and not the wider community.
@@Arkholt2 What people generally accept as the term's meaning is irrelevant. To gate keep is to limit or prevent access to a thing. By banning a person from a group, web site, or forum you have kept the gate. It is the definition of the word.
For what it's worth, I'm one of the comments at around 34:00 "downplaying my skill" and I don't feel that way at all? I just know that what's strongest and easiest to use in a given game doesn't always perfectly overlap with what I find fun. The reply to me that you highlight offers the unsolicited advice of "if you used that mechanic you don't like you could do x!" and that made me think "hmm that's kinda neat even though I'm never gonna do it," not feel invalidated in some way.
There was definitely a lot of room for misinterpretation in all my research. I suppose the point I was trying to get at is that certain classes have varying value depending on the playstyle, and that someone shouldn't feel their playstyle is less skilled because they value units differently from how the standard playstyle values them. I understand now that this is not the stance you are trying to defend, and I apologize. I really wish I could have gone in a lot more detail about my thoughts on every comment, but that obviously wouldn't be feasible, as my analysis was already long enough.
@@queenlyarts oh, I was specifically the comment about not using captured units in Fates, not the archer enjoyer. There's no need to apologize or anything, this doesn't hurt my feelings either, but the only real issue I feel my case illustrates is people maybe being a bit too overeager to share their expertise unsolicited (especially something widely known like Rallyman)?
It's funny. If you play through a Pokémon challenge hack with mons like Corsola and Vespiquen, everyone thinks you're an absolute Chad. If you beat Theater of Blood while locking yourself in Morytania, you become the biggest 07scape channel on TH-cam. Beat Pikmin without getting any Blues, and you're similarly an absolute unit. But apparently, wanting to spend a slot on Amelia shows that I suck at strategy games. Never mind that I'm adding an element of short-term complexity to the game due to needing to clear the chapter while also working to feed Amelia kills, and then successfully working around it with careful planning. Never mind that some of Amelia's supports *actively encourage* the player to train her. Never mind that I *just* got done clearing Chapter 6 with Seth benched, no deaths, and all villagers saved by the Great Gilliam Airdrop (which will also be met with public outcry from Reddit, because Gilliam). I suck, apparently!
Just vouch in and say that I might be an oddball for playing Fire Emblem like how I play XCOM: I enjoy pre-combat prepping, I enjoy training my units to their fullest potential, and I enjoy thinking about how to build fun units. So this whole "just use Ryoma to clear the game" or "just solo the game with Seth" never appealed to me. First time I thought it was a joke but apparently not
Knife only runs in Resident Evil: Respectable challenge run, adds challenge and replayability to the game. Deploying swordlocked units in Fire Emblem: "Lol this guy must be a moron."
Interestingly enough, right after I watched your video, TH-cam recommended me this: th-cam.com/video/7-_rK0KkB6k/w-d-xo.html I thought you made a follow-up video until I clicked on it and realized it was made by a different person in a totally different context. And yet, as I watched the video, I noticed so many parallels to the Fire Emblem community's "efficiency mindset". It felt kinda surreal and I kept wondering if this person is secretly a FE player. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share. 🙂
That was a fantastic video, thank you for bringing it to my attention. Their main application of the topic was to the education system, but for the most part they kept it pretty broad, and I also found myself thinking about how it can be applied to the FE community. I actually remember a comment on one of my Reddit points bringing up Goodhart's law too: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Now, their actual example involving video games at 40:30 didn't directly apply. They presented the measurement of video games being effective as being "fun", and explained how the measurement of whether someone can beat the game doesn't actually measure the original goal, but recontextualizes the conversation around how to most optimally beat the game. Most players aren't actually trying to measure the effectiveness of the games as entertainment when talking about what's most efficient or optimal. As we've seen, there are a lot of "counterarguments" centered around "play however you want, but gameplay discussions wish to go beyond analyzing what's fun". Players are stating that the goal of FE gameplay discussions is to (in my words) provide a thought experiment that lets players express and further develop their game knowledge. One common sentiment I've seen is that "tier lists are fine because even if they aren't objective, the real value is the discussion that forms around it". So the actual critique here, and the way we would apply the takeaways from this video, is to both judge whether players have been effective in achieving the goal of gameplay discussions, and whether that even means it's "good". And yes, there have been a lot of discussions formed from tier lists and the like, but for those engaging in discussions to come to a tangible conclusion, it's ineffective- and many players have expressed determining what the "best" strategies are to be their goal/interest. For those who wish to make unit guides- are we actually coming up with effective suggestions for players who want help? We hardly know what every player needs help with, since the units you use is only a small contributor to one's ability to beat the game, and ease of use varies anyways. So perhaps unit guides are also ineffective, just resulting in discussions from experienced players arguing whether X unit would be easier for players with an indeterminably "low" amount of experience to use than Y unit. And even if these discussions are effective in meeting their goals- are they good? Some players may enjoy the experience, but we have to consider how they facilitate a frustrating environment where players are just talking past each other. I've seen responses talking about how "players debating and not agreeing" is "good, actually", which is a sentiment I absolutely cannot get behind. Why must we be complacent in sticking with the established forms of discussion, when we could try to accomplish the same goals in a different manner? There are other ways players can have their thoughts on available strategies expanded that don't involve trying to make comparisons rooted in vague measurements. Being vague may be effective in opening up the discussion to more players, but does that make it good when we now have an even wider base of players that are being told their evaluations and contributions are wrong? Zoe also brings up a quote at 1:00:21, stating that "just as there is no one strategy guaranteed to spark the next big idea. Until the tech industry recognizes that reality, it'll remain a work environment that's best suited for one very specific type of individual- and the products it creates will continue to primarily meet the needs of that very same group". This brings up another issue with gameplay discussions centered around efficiency- even if they're effective, they're creating an environment that only suits the needs of players who enjoy discussing efficiency. I've read many comments saying "just start your own discussion if you don't enjoy efficiency", but this doesn't address how efficiency has been set as the standard for discussions, and it's been demonstrated over the years that gameplay discussions under other contexts have faced a lot of struggle in being taken seriously, getting traction, or avoiding the issue of "backseaters" interjecting their thoughts based on efficiency. You don't have respond to my thoughts, because like Zoe expressed, the real value of a lot of writing isn't whether others see it, but the learning process that occurred along the way. To conclude, I'll bring up one final quote, dedicated to everyone that has responded saying that the issues I'm calling out are an inherent part of online gameplay discussions and cannot be avoided, so there's no point in changing anything: "The way things are isn't the way they have to be. We can choose to say no to efficiency. We must". The context is slightly different, but the sentiment still stands.
the thing about anna is we played without dlc. everything becomes different when you are given silver weapons and the well. i still love the shield bonded strats.
Same, Bonded Shield is such a cool take on an Enemy Phase tool. I'm doubtful it'll come back in future titles, but I hope they keep experimenting with similar mechanics going forward.
Standard tier lists should just be based on playing through the game in a way that isnt mind-numbingly slow and grindy, because in most games if you grind a ton and turtle or juggernaut every map then almost every unit will he able to be equally as good as every other unit. More importantly, tier lists need in-depth explanations to go with them, otherwise theyre useless. MOST importantly though, the assholes in the community need to shut up sometimes. Preferably most of the time.
I've been a Fire Emblem player since 2003, and in the early 2000s I specifically shied away from online discourse surrounding the games, because it's the same kind of discourse I had no choice but to deal with in MMOs (Like FFXI and Everquest). Particularly around about 2007. When mathematics are heavily involved with gameplay, there is always a large camp that obeys the math no matter what, while also saying the math favors certain abilities over others, even if it doesn't, really. While also saying they obey the math for fun. As far as I'm concerned, I generally tend to place great value on units who can do things no other units can do, as well as early game units that have ample time to be built. And when I say things no other unit can do, I'm not talking about ORKOing Unit Type X even if they rolled high stats at base on Map X, I'm talking like... hold this point without being threatened or kill this boss by themselves etc. Stuff that's clearcut and possibly more related to stat caps. Like how in Radiant Dawn, for instance, Boyd is the only unit capable of fighting with The Black Knight, and killing him, without being Master Crown promo'd. And I don't mean, finishing him off after a Tier 3 Haar chip. I mean, Boyd does all of the combat, and either 3HKOs BK or OHKOs him with a Bond induced Critical hit. (And perhaps the real value, isn't doubled). Or Lyn Mode Dorcas being the unit who can survive a Luna crit on the boat map in Fe7. More tangentially, is the constant warring over waifus. As cold and logical as FE discussions can be, people will overrate their favorite waifus, often in excess, but sometimes just by 1 tier in a list. It's understandable, but hilariously always points out that people are using the math in the game to aid and abet their preferences, rather than to strike out objectively. Quite often, no matter how well you frame your arguments, PoV, or methods, the chorus from online will say, "That frame of reference is irrelevant."
You are like a messiah to me in this community right now, and I believe I stand with a silent significant group that stands behind what you are trying to do. A few months ago I came to the conclusion I would refuse to participate in the FE community. I will flat out say it, I don't care what any other fandom has done, I regard it as by far the most toxic jrpg fandom in existence. While not my primary complaint, efficiency's curse was a secondary reason for me. I could go on and on on why to be honest. From the fearmongering that if you "dont include efficiency" there is no way to benefit stats like mov on tier lists (even though there are in different metrics, like how mov adds flexibility on a turn-by-turn basis for players). Or weird assuming that "no efficiency" means infinite grinding allowed????? I could also define my standards I liked for tier lists. It is complex, but essentially I would use holding on to the many "restrictions" efficiency tier lists use, but shifting turns to being about investement in > flexibility/available non-obtuse (meaning players can figure them out without spreadsheeting) strats to help win maps out. Though I am open to other interpretations as well. I could also say how I think people like Mekkah have done a diservice to this community by refusing to use letter tiers for his "guides" instead using "niche utility flyer on a Wednesday" tiers or whatever. In that this mentality assumes efficiency deserves a "monopoly" on the idea of unit usefulness comparisons through traditional tiering. Also implying you can't use traditional letter tiering if you don't use efficiency, and encouraging the idea that without efficiency such tiering is worthless. Ultimately though I am just tired to be honest, and though I may be reaching, I believe I may be speaking for a very significant non-FE active portion of FE players. Maybe if FE had a system like Valkyria Chronicles that actually gave the player bonuses for lower turns (thus making efficiency translate into making the game easier in future maps) this all would be much better.
Weirdly enough, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn gave bonus xp awards for fast map clears which makes them the only games that encourage fast map completion to any degree as far as I'm aware.
Yup I'm part of that "silent group" you're talking about. I wouldn't be surprised if the "efficiency mindset" has alienated a lot of people and caused them to leave. Nowadays I occasionally lurk on Serenes Forest, but I hardly post anymore. I don't even bother with FE on Reddit and Gamefaqs. You're right, it's too toxic, and every post I make feels like walking on eggshells.
Thanks for making this video. I've never liked tier lists and the "efficiency" mentality, and its effect on the community as a whole. But every time I tried to speak out against it, I felt alone in my struggle. It wasn't until you made this video, and I saw dozens of people also vent their frustrations, that I finally feel vindicated.
Okay let me say congrats on the study. It is very needed and much welcomed and appreciated. But at times of the video you shown concern, confusion, or dishearten about certain aspects of the community. I can understand that 'cause you are no longer touching the community-- you have stumbled unto a much larger subject beyond. What you started to encounter was that of personality types and how they affect and even effect their hobbies. To begin, as much as this study was a joy to listen to, chances are that it is junk. Mainly because of Reddit. Reddit is trash for nearly any study about hobbies within pop culture (and I don't include that from a personal standing). Time and time again it has been proven that Reddit is full of bandwagons riders-- and the Fire Emblem community on Reddit is one of them. The reason why you got such a kickback for going out of the "considered" thought was because you were running into type B personalities. These people most likely did not play the game but only joined in a large group 'cause it was popular. I've seen it so many times; you say something that is not "considered" thought and get dog piled with no real opposing argument. That is because again these people didn't play the game; they don't know the specifics of the game to refute, so they attack. You have to toss it out. Stick with Serenes Forest or other sites that actually have a large fan base that literally played the games. This didn't become a problem until after the Telos games and didn't become a pandemic until Awaking made the game popular. Type B only want things in groups, while that in of itself isn't bad, when you get a bunch of them together it can easily turn into an echo chamber of group think. Which is what you were running into. A lot of older Fire Emblem players fall into Type A [they want to experiment], thus the older days before the Telos migration, were filled with more arguments about story and character quirks/ archetypes/ roles. Not much on mechanics unless there was a question or request for advice. Before the Telos migration "efficiency" was this [and a lot of older players still believe this to still be the case]: 1). Army of taste-- Fire Emblem key focus isn't combat but characters. The creator wants you to invest with the characters, and you can't get involved with a character if you don't use them. This is why so many characters have specific skills and traits only to them; to make that character stand out and grasp your attention, so you can get to know them personally. 2). Map-- each map is a type. Some characters do good on one and abysmal on the other. 3). Safety and comfort-- if you can safely conquer your objective, then the plan worked. What is the point of doing a low turn count plan and miss the attack (because Fire Emblem is a game of chance), and half of your army get wiped? What is the point of going at a snails pace if you have a certain number of rds to get the objective done? What ever characters to your taste, can fit the map and get the job done in a safe and comfortable manner is efficient. I hope this helps. So serious about Reddit. If you do this in other genres you will get the same thing and if you ask certain things about the genres, that only people who played would know,--I am not joking-- you may see results of maybe above 75% of people that have not played the genre are attacking you over.
That's a fair assessment. I'm familiar with broad community opinions from offhandedly seeing content over the years, but I haven't actively been involved in any community for all too long, so a lot of this was coming off of observations. With there being so much history look back at, it's possible I was looking in the wrong spaces. To speak to your point about Reddit, I suppose my lack of experience on the site past a few months ago led me to have more faith in the space. Also, as I stated in the survey discussion, a lot of the responses were indeed coming from Reddit, but I definitely had to just kind of hope this was representing more than just that space. In the future, I'll try to clarify questions to get a better sense of which communities are being represented, or just don't post to Reddit if you truly think that it's not worth it. I still think that as a large space with issues that actively cause contention, it's worth acknowledging them, but perhaps a different approach would be needed.
Uh oh, are they actually disabled? I generally turn likes to not be visible for my videos, and I believe dislikes have been not visible across TH-cam for a while, but if you're not even able to leave either one, I'll have to look into it.
I’m of the opinion that efficiency is just an excuse for nerds online to validate themselves. FE has no leaderboards, this is a single-player jrpg that has little execution barrier or skill ceiling beyond just finishing the game. Of course some units are better than others, but especially in recent games anybody can be used so such heated discussion with using Anna in engage is just stupid.
If I had to say more I think there could be a definition based on judging units on making the game "easier" for new players (maybe or maybe not based on the investement/flexibility formula I described) HOWEVER when I say "new players" I do not mean inexperienced. I mean people trying out a game for the first few runs and trying to beat a certain difficulty. This can range all the way from doing their first normal classic victory, to acomplishing FE12 Lunatic Reverse. So if it is not clear, this definition of "new players" covers basically nearly the entirety of the playerbase as weird as that may sound, and so when people say "tier lists to help new players" it should NOT be interpretted as meaning just a niche thing to help your little brother play his first FE game.
I think this is a really interesting train of thought. I've been reconsidering the place "ease of use" may or may not have in various gameplay discussions, and I like this example of a specific use case that you laid out. I can't guarantee I'll make another survey/analysis on the topic, but I'll give it some serious consideration before making any other statements/videos relating to unit analysis.
So to me, LTC is a speedrun category. Playing for ltc requires rigging crits and growths, generally unreliable strategies, and glitches/skips. For an exsmple theres a 2 turn ltc for 3-9 of RD thst involves rigging a meteor crit and possibly a promotion of calill for a mastery skill proc Efficiency as a style is not very friendly to certain unit types such as armors, archers and the est archetype which makes some people very angry I dont really engage with tier lists outside of radiant dawn in which i like to go in to argue against jill and sothe and also for ilyana>soren.
I royally hate the "Efficiency" talk in Fire Emblem and have felt alienated by the wider community for years because I don't find that discussion engaging. Warp Skipping defeats the entire point of the game IMO, and the route to achieving "Efficient" play is just boring to me. A run where all you have is 1 class because "It'S tHe BeSt" and not in the context of some challenge run is just boring and samey to me, there's no strategy to it, just spam Wyvern Lords or Paladins to the boss, and give yourself a gold star. You might as well be playing with godmode on, and it's frustrating when I try and share or contribute and get completely shut down for not having that same viewpoint as, supposedly, everyone else that LTC is the way to go, if you're not playing efficiently you're playing it wrong, ETC. I bet Fire Emblem would have a much wider audience if this kind of fan discussion stopped, because it's made me not want to keep playing despite being a long time superfan of the series... Personally, I like "Juggernaughting", I like getting every Gaiden Chapter, I like recruiting every unit and keeping everyone possible alive through the end (even though Permadeath hasn't been something the series has been designed for since like, FE6/7, Classic Mode is the objectively worse way to play modern Fire Emblem), and complete every side objective and get every hidden item/reward (To clarify, such as the rewards for saving all Green units), and get the best/true/most complete ending (for games that have it, looking at you FE6). I absolutely loved sending my Assassin Colm out in the Tower of Valni and Lagdou Ruins in FE8 and letting him one-man-army his way through the mobs and clear the dungeons, eventually unlocking freaking LYON which was just so cool to have and use and I wish I'd still had anything to DO in the game once I got him! I liked reclassing my units incessantly and figuring out how to get Galeforce AND Armsthrift on my whole main squad in Awakening, or make the best possible units I could in Fates. I love taking an Est archetype unit (the "Villager" type) and babying them until they've capped out every stat and have become and absolute god unit. then doing as best I can to do the same thing for the rest of my main squad (Sorry Bench, FE games have WAY to big a cast for me to do that for EVERYONE). I like playing with my favourites, damn if they're good or not because I like the CHARACTER. I recently replayed FE6 and I absolutely LOVED Echidna. She was absolute trash compared to the rest of my squad because she joined at a pretty high level and got screwed by some of her levelups that I couldn't take the time to fix like I did with some other units. (Sonia and Fir ended up nearly capped in every stat by comparison, and Roy was able to one-round solo Idunn by comparison) I felt bad benching Wendy to bring her... I didn't even use some of the units I'd planned to initially because playing through made me love some of them that I hadn't expected to when I started. Or didn't know existed. If I'd posted about that experience on the Fire Emblem subreddit, I'd be downvoted to hell and laughed at for even THINKING to use Fir and Wendy, putting any effort into training up Roy and Sonia, and possibly even using Echidna and Geese. I'd be ridiculed and ostracized and insulted. That's not a good reaction from the community towards someone just wanting to have fun with the game we all presumably like, and that's extremely depressing. All because the community has this unhealthy obsession with "Efficiency"
The FE subreddit is genuinely insane, I've never seen such a contrarian bizarro world. I think they would unironically enjoy Fire Emblem more if it was like that romhack that turns all the characters into generics.
@dyrr836 I mean, I've seen this kind of mentality bleed into discussion on other platforms, not just the FE subreddit. Just Reddit is really good at being a hub for niche interests and talking in that manner. But even here on TH-cam, most Fire Emblem TH-camrs tout the LTC playstyle, talk about units in terms of efficiency, call units bad just because they have less move, etc. It’s a pervasive mindset and thinking, and it makes me not want to engage with like, the Romhack scene because I'm expecting that that kind of approach is going to just be further encouraged, and punish me for wanting to play any other way, because that's the narrative that's being fronted. Hell, I've even played full release games clearly inspired by FE that have these mindsets at their core, and ended up being really unfun for the trouble. A game being inspired by one of my fav franchises SHOULD NOT BE A RED FLAG. But it is b3cause of this damn community and efficiency first LTC mindset. I absolutely despise it.
@@Kilo6Charlie I've never played a single FE romhack because most of them seem to be made for niche players only. The exception being Project Ember which seems to be made with normal players in mind.
I have some issues with fe that I'm just gonna vent because I feel like it, so I find it really dumb how permadeath is always justified under the banner of personal experience yet some personal experiences aren't really seen as valid, like permadeath is a mechanic that is good because it gives people unique experiences yet when someone wants their experience to be on casual mode or using meme builds it is seen as less valid because it's not the true experience(wich is kinda stupid anyways, like challenge runs also aren't the true experience yet everyone loves those for the most part), there also just generally seems to be some riggedness like I saw one person arguing that cindered shadows edelgard is better off as a warrior because generals have a bad reputation even though with the exception of the move heavy maps warrior doesn't do a lot for her or someone dismissing gregory for his low speed completely ignoring things like his inherent staves and high magic stat or generally people dismissing someone reclassing someone out of their best class, or even people defending bullshit like fog of war, ambush spawns and 1% crits as stuff you just had to deal with back in the day rather then just stupid shit like it actually is, now for me personally I originally did feel a bit under pressure like I had to justify the way I play the game, now I think that's stupid it's my copy of the game and I get to play it however I like even if it isn't the correct way
*sigh* Videos like this remind me of way I have come to dislike the FE community in recent years. The problem was never the convention of efficiency; it was an intentionally vague convention those of us who liked to discuss units agreed upon because it differentiated units more effectively than any other set of assumptions. It took many years and new ideas to come into its own. If anything, the current meta is way less strict than it used to be since, for example, ideas like "it can often be beneficial to promote before lv. 20" became more widespread. No, the problem came when less-veteran players or community members became influenced by those who came before them and took the conventions out of context in order to justify some weird sense of superiority above even newer players. Just like in other genres and series, the meta and tier lists were never meant for new players to adhere to. The purpose was to merely for veterans to compare and contrast units and for new players to simply take ideas from *if they wanted to*. They were never a guideline for how to play. Veterans are not immune from using characters they simply like, using characters that would give them a challenge, or using "meme builds". In fact, it was this experimentation by the community that the current meta was built on the back of. Telling me that my last FE7 playthrough where I killed the fire dragon with Kent was "inefficient" will only get a response of "I know and it's awesome". Then again, players that feel as if tier lists or conventions that have evolved over the past 20+ years need to care about their own personal playstyles are infinitely more annoying. The "golden runs" that these tier lists imply almost never happen in reality outside of maybe some challenge runs. How I actually play isn't defined by the meta any more than any other player's is. I'm not going to tell someone how to play, but I'm also not going to care about someone who thinks their preferences should be validated over the contributions of thousands of players since FE7 was released. I also will never tell someone how to play or expect someone to play according to the meta, so I really don't get where this entitlement comes from.
The real big takeaway from this video is that framing is what truly matters in discussion. If two people are arguing about a fire emblem unit or strategy, it is very easy for them to just argue past each other because they can't agree on the framework.
I recently stumbled upon a 2 year old reddit threat where someone was arguing that FE10 Jill is overrated. They laid out a very well researched argument that, under their assumption of hard mode, no transfers and efficient play, Jill fails to reliably meet key thresholds in the lategame. Their whole argument was built on stat averages, including recently discovered formulas for calculating stat gains from bonus experience. The most common disagreement to their argument ended up being something like "you are not rigging enough".
This situation pretty much sums up my stance on the issue. You can't have a good faith argument if you are not willing to have it on a common ground. The poster of that reddit argument disagreed with the common consensus that it is ok to rig stats for the sake of maximum efficiency, and his detractors were arguing in a way that at least implicitly assumes some amount of stat rigging. The result was a not exactly fruitful discussion.
Nino being bad because too late, too much effort. Jill being good because you can put in effort to rig stats. Seems legit.
Yikes. I was about to post some examples of my own of my frustrations with the FE community, but your example really takes the cake. It really goes to show how biased some people are, and how little self-awareness they have.
@@bladerdj3503 The argument about stat rigging is not without merit. Rigging stats for Nino doesn't give you anything that you couldn't get from other units in the same class. Rigging stats for Jill does give you the fastest possible clear, nobody else is as good as her. If we are talking about wanting to get the minimum turn count necessary, then stat rigging or resetting for critical hits is a legit strategy. I have not issue with someone trying to LTC a game and discussing a game within this framework. But there should be room for discussion outside of this.
@@FiboSai Using cheat codes is even more optimal strat
@@FiboSai Ye and thats the point. Usually the strategies for LTCs, making it as easy as possible for you and the quality of a unit in a plain normal, casual run (rarely considering Permadeath) are often mixed and used as the framework for "Efficiency." Prime example of the collective agreement "That unit is good/S-Tier" would be in Mekkahs recent video about the Vaike > Robin thread. Surely, in any run below Lunatic Robin x Chrom A/S Rank is braindead AFK mode, but in Lunatic it takes some effort and abusing of game mechanics/grinding to make that work. But efficiency usually also means to make it easier in a somewhat fast as possible way. Rather thats what I always thought about Efficiency.
I would 100% agree that Jill is, in a casual run even without rigging and stat boosters the best unit in Part 1 (alongside Nolan who comes earlier and is the tanky head of the Dawn brigade). Training her up makes your time a lot easier and is more desireable than giving others favoritism. In the end you get a second Haar. But then again we also have the situation that, in a ranked Run Nino is amazing to boost up your Level Stat and simultaneously becomes a pretty good magic user due to her growths. A stealable Promotion item is there one chapter after her recruitment (depending on difficulty). Another one right before the finale. If done right, Nino CAN become a decent unit, if not better than a trained Erk, Lucius or Canas. The latter has the Luna niche tho. But in the end you also get Athos which begs the question if you even need any mage besides Staff users and Pent (who IS a good staff user too).
I think the biggest problem is not that the ways of ranking are still not 100% objective (and will never truly be), it is more that the "rules" don't really clarify enough in which ways a unit prevails or sucks. Especially now where Hard mode and more difficult hard mode, time rewind, shitton of skills and other ressources exist. And then we also have the typical toxic behaviour towards the ones who have a different opinion and don't get credit unless it turns out to be really good instantly or they are a big personality in the scene. I do feel that there were improvements over the years on that part tho.
In the end, I feel it should be more about which units are good to use if you are unsure who to train or to learn how to build an army and know the most important aspects of what makes units good and less about the mentality of creating the most perfect army with the best units and builds. Latter are definitly good for Maddening, Lunatic modes and the likes. But there are at least 2 difficulties below that too. And, even if most of the FE games are over a decade old, the formula of using whatever you like (unless in Thracia pherhaps, for certain reasons) will still give you the chance to beat the game in a decent manner. It is incredible easy for a newcomer to get into the spot that you feel you need to have these perfect builds to have a good time (just like the Jagen Pitfall) which can ultimately rob you of your blind experience and therefore some enjoyment with the games. (And ye, this is a problem with many games for different reasons nowadays, but usually when you wanna get into older titles of a series like Fire Emblem you gotta dig into the internet and will encounter Elitists and the likes along the way - best tip is to do what you want and seek help if you REALLY get stuck somewhere).
There's only one way to measure effectiveness:
Are their crit animations cool looking?
Every unit in FE6, 7, & 8 is efficient.
@@dominicjannazo7144engage too
no...
the best char design (sees the community in fire arguing about the best looking char)
the way people talk about fire emblem is kinda the same as if people talking about pokemon just assumed any discussion about a pokemon is within the context of a hardcore nuzlocke, when it's actually a very specific set of arbitrary restriction that only an extreme minority of players engage with.
Exactly also I love your vivi PFP 👍
"Efficiency, and its consequences, has been a disaster for the Fire Emblem community." - Ted Corrynski
Fire Emblem 7 was really just a story about delivering a Luna tome to Athos, and Fire Emblem 8 was just a story meant to cover up Seth's gratuitous violence.
I don't use Seth... am I still covering up his violence?@MK_ULTRA420
A personal anecdote: I recently (like within the last year, recent in my brain at least) played two games through of Fire Emblem 8: The Sacred Stones. On my first playthrough, I intentionally promoted all units in the army away from horses, and made all forced horses into Great Knights that I could. For units like wyvern rider and pegasus knight, I promoted into the 'heaviest' class available, either wyvern lord or wyvern knight. The reign of Great Knights and Warriors, Sages and Bishops. It was fine and obliterated the game. The long march, trudging to inevitable victory.
On my second playthrough, I intentionally promoted all units in the army possible onto a horse, and when multiple options available into the faster or lighter unit options. Neimi and Gerik as Rangers, Ewan and Lute as Mage Knights, and 5 Paladins charging to victory. I learned that the Ranger class actually feels really good to use, Neimi is actually one of my better units on that save IIRC. It was a very pleasant surprise.
And while the first game play was fine and fun, this second round felt better and more fun to play. It was also faster, sure, but the movement speed alone was not the reason for that. It felt more, tactical, with so much ability to canto and do other things. Mage Knight and Valkyrie are amazing classes to use. Overall this version just felt more fluid and fun to play. The first game was easier, because the units were generally more tanky and just did not care about the enemies much, but the second game was not so hard as to make me think much of it. The army was noticeably frailer, but with 2 Mage Knights and 2 Valkyrie on the field, that was not a problem to heal through at all. It really is amazing how *different* the 2 runs of this game felt to play through, despite them being on the same game.
It also made me think about the FE focus on efficiency, and makes me wonder if this is why so many FE7/8 players are so horse-crazy. It did feel very good to play, so like, I get it, if they played through the game and noticed the same feeling, it might make them assume that everyone always does the same thing and that is the normal.
Ironically though people tend to hate Ranger Gerik. I basically always used horse promotions whenever I could when playing SS even ones seen as sub optimal (Gerik, Natasha). The hardcore community tends to prefer horses... but Gerik and Natasha are exceptions in that regard. Granted they say "don't use Natasha" anyway.
One of the things I disagree with is the avoidance of comparing units - there is ultimately value in comparing units due to the restrictive nature of limited deployment slots. Tier List discussions hold value in that way and accomplish something unit guides/perfomance charts cannot, although I agree those have value also.
That's definitely something interesting to consider- in a sense, the games do force the player to choose certain units to use overs through limit deployment slots, outside of cases like Gaiden/SoV and Genealogy. Even in those games, you still generally need to choose which units get limited resources, which ranges from stat boosters to something as basic as being involved in combat to get EXP.
I think there's still an issue in trying to say which units are more deserving of deployment/resources in a broad context. If the player is going for the "best" results under a certain metric, then certain strategies, classes, units, etc. can absolutely be argued to contribute to that goal. If the goal is just to beat the game, then it becomes a little trickier. From what I can tell, unit guides are actually still comparative, but they use categories that make general comparisons about broad aspects like ease of use and investment needed to have high performance. It's a lot more subjective, because as another comment pointed out, "ease of use" can also depend on the player, among some other issues. It's not strictly trying to say which strategy/unit is comparatively better, but still makes comparisons that lets players make informed decisions when choosing which units to deploy. Outside of a few obvious examples, it's difficult to say which units will be "better" for defeating the game for any given player if there's nothing else being measured.
So while the player does have to choose between units, it's generally difficult to make comparisons that say which is a better choice, outside of the context of a specific playthrough actively aiming to get some sort of best results. The most applicable "metric" for comparisons that attempt to speak to how the game is "typically" played is ease of use. I totally think that it's worth talking about, but it has enough variance to where I think more categorical comparisons are both more fitting and effective.
As for my rough idea of a unit performance chart, I also agree that shouldn't be all players use to discuss units or guide how they play. It's just one form of analysis that would let players express the same game knowledge they are now, but in a more consistent format that also lets other players contribute their non-standard experiences. At least, that was my goal, and it would need some polishing before getting used.
The critical imbalance lies with the idea that efficiency is a direct one to one to "skill and fun". It is for some, and isn't for others. Efficient runs are one way to play fire emblem, but they aren't the only way.
As a kid who mindlessly played Eliwood Normal Mode a ton, I tried a bunch of strats to reach endgame. Training 1 unit only, training a well balanced army; none of it worked. I'd get to either Final Chapter or before it, die after a particularly long or hard chapter like Night of Farewells, and be too annoyed to continue the save file; reset, and repeat. Then one day, I tried training my lords; it worked. I got to the end, and didn't look back.
The efficient strat of juggernauting with one unit as your main combatant, ala Marcus, failed me, even on the game's easiest difficulty (discounting Lyn Mode). It was only by finding a winning strategy that I was able to formulate lasting opinions about the characters, and their impact on the experience. I didn't have the knowledge or skill to solo run Marcus. Efficiency is a useful metric, but it isn't the whole picture. If you know how to *use* that efficiency properly, Kieran slaps FE9 while letting Ike sit back. A less proficient player would find more success training their Ike, and keeping Titania nearby, but not doing everything. But that's finishing the game; what if you're already good at doing that?
Well, a more proficient player might enjoy the struggle of raising a zero to hero Nino, or constructing silly turn economy nonsense with their dancer. They might also enjoy watching Seth low-man the entirety of pre-rpute split with ferrybot Venessa.
But this doesn't invalidate any one strategy or gameplat style. Bartre sucks hard without immense training. Rolf is terrible for efficiency, and Wendy gives me great reason to question if her armor is made of paper mache. But having used all three, they're a blast! I like playing through 7 without Marcus, and 8 without Seth. I played Eliwood Hard mode only using girl units to fight; I had to beat FIVE CHAPTERS with just Rebecca, and it was absolute Hell; but very fun! It's okay to play how you want, it's okay to not be as efficient as humanly possible.
But if that's how you enjoy playing it, that's cool too. Toss those three and Rebecca into the bench immediately, and smash Elibe with your army of horsies and flyers. The cool part about fire emblem, is that you can probably beat the game with just about any half-way competent strategy (and with an adult's sense of persistance, child-me).
But, it's also important to read the room, and what's being discussed.
Efficiency≠fun, and efficiency≠easiest. It's just another way to play. Efficient players want to discuss unit viability in a context of finishing the game with minimal resources spent, minimal training, and cutting out extraneous taskmastering. Seth is a God in 8 because he runs rickshaw with the whole game, but he still needs a little help to be truly efficient. Venessa for ferrying, Moulder for healing, and even some other units offering a hand to speed maps up until you get to Duessel, Cormag, or other combat units that can assist Seth.
Other times, people are discussing who their favorite unit is. If someone says "Amelia", or "Meg"... Let them have that :3 They're fun to train, and they have neat character arcs and personalities. They don't need to be "lectured" on how useless they are in their respective games. If I wanna levin sword mage knight Anna in Engage, then I'm murdering every single window shopper in Elyos, god dammit :3 At the same time, efficiency players don't need to hear for the hundreth time how "Actually, Sophie is pwnage incarnate when you arena grind her for 100 turns with savestates"... Like- yeah. I hope she would be :3 It's alright to like bad efficiency. It's okay to only want to play with units that are great at efficient play, even if you yourself aren't that efficient, or if you are, or anyhow or anyway. Games are flexible, dawg.
In conclusion, just be respectful. It's a video game at the end of the day :3
Extremely interesting video. I've been a Fire Emblem fan since I was a kid in 2005, but have only started following discussions of strategy & efficiency a few years ago, previously being someone who played the games primarily for the characters/story. The tips and strategies discussed by the efficiency crowd really helped me improve my skills at the game and being able to accomplish what I wanted to achieve, but I still never felt like the tier lists etc that the efficiency discussions landed on really represented a style of play that I enjoyed, and I agree with you that there's a slight undercurrent of "this is the superior way to play" in some of these conversations, although I also think this has lessened in recent years with more recognition of various playstyles.
I kind of wish there were more discussion in the FE world that tiered and debated characters on the metric of how fun they are to use or "is this unit designed well" because it's self-evidently subjective but still involves material facts. For example, no one would say that Seth in FE8 is a bad unit by the metric of most standard tier lists, but there's a fair argument that he makes the game less enjoyable because he's so superior to other characters that it reduces the player's fun of deciding which units they prefer to use. (Of course, this then becomes its own separate debate about game design and how to cater to players' preferences, so I don't think this kind of thing should be a dominant mode of unit discussion but I would like to see it brought up more because I personally find it an interesting conversation.)
This is kind of a side note, but I've always found it odd that support grinding in GBA FE seems universally regarded as non-efficient or as "cheesy" in the same way as arena abuse / optional battles / boss abuse, since by comparison to those strategies it's extremely easy to do and relatively fast, requiring little effort or thought from the player and only wasting turns while pressing up+a in order to achieve a stat bonus. I would expect that if you factor in the real-time effort (as a decent number of respondents to your survey seemed to do), rather than purely turn count, it could be considered relatively efficient depending on what support you want. Is it because it's too easy, or seems exploitative against the game's intentions of how you should play it? I would be interested to see a debate which did the math on the efficiency value of support grinding if one doesn't consider it to be banned, which would require people to be definitive about how much they value low turns over low time spent (i.e., to me the turn number going up doesn't feel like it makes much difference if nothing happened on the turn and all of the enemies are already cleared)
In respect to the idea of different ways of playing. Regular, Est, and Jaigen type characters should be separated. Est being later recruitment, high growth. Jagens being pre-promoted classes with high base statistics but low growths. Perhaps different classifications could also be separated since they are not the same thing. Tanks, damage deals, healers, supports(which includes dancers etc.) A player phase build would look something like level 10 mage for +2 magic, Focus(+10% critical hit when units are 3 spaces or more away from allies), level 15 into Sage for +5 to Tome damage, 5 levels into Grandmaster for Ignis(+half your strength or magic). When I make my tier lists I take the single best damage dealer, tank, healer, and support if there is one and only those units make it into the top tier.
If you want to see some discussion on unit design and how fun they are, check out Professor Bopper and Mekkah's videos on "unit feel". They talk about things like how earlygame cavaliers, despite being good often feel bad because they're often not exceptional in any way, notoriously bad units that are fun to train, and how sometimes it's just fun to run a game over with an earlygame prepromote. It's the framework for discussion that I personally enjoy the most because it takes a step back and examines what makes the game fun in the first place.
For support grinding, it probably counts as non-efficient or cheesy as arena abuse simply because the games used to record your turn count and grade you for it. So any chapter turncount that exceeds double digits are seen as "inefficient".
It's really interesting because ever since starting my channel, I've almost exclusively stuck to the Fates community, and for whatever reason (maybe it's Zoran's wonderful skill builds, maybe it's just the lack of foot traffic in the 3ds world, or some other reason I can't comprehend), we've really managed to sort of de-emphasize turn count and real time speed as the be-all end-all. There are absolutely holdouts who prefer the raw turn-based efficiency context and runs that care about those metrics above all else, but it's really a surprising thing we've been able to do.
Not saying the Fates community is a monolith, far from it, but we really see weird and wild contexts all the time and we just roll with it. I've definitely been guilty of trying to overcorrect for the overcentralized effficiency-based value judgements the community has seemed to land on, but my goal has always been to make it easier and more welcoming for new people to get into Fates, and I just wanted to take this moment to thank my community for being so awesome. I can't think of another place where I could go, drop the world's most ludicrous run concept and see like half a dozen people genuinely engage with it and theorycraft with me about the value of ideas, strategies, builds, and units.
I see a lot of newcomers just having an absolute blast playing Fates for their first time and having a reliable backbone of a community to fall back on whenever they need some help that's willing to tell them to go further in their insane theories and frankly criminal skill builds, and I really hope that one day the FE community as a whole could buck the somewhat negative reputation we have and move past this conflict.
it may be in part how hard a game conquest is.People might generally be more focused on figuring out ways to make their runs less painful before being more efficient.
CQ and Rev are hard as fuck games. Prioritizing turn count in a game with no way to rig the RNG would require so many resets. Such a high roll isn't worth it.
I think that because of this Fates players have mostly adopted the "reliable LTC" mind set.
Omg its the one and only lagspike776
I have been attempting to push my builds in Fire Emblem Awakening further lately. I tried a Male Robin +magic/-strength Maribelle pair-up to turn Morrigan into a monster mage in Normal. I tried a +speed/-skill Male Robin, Fredrick, Tharja playthrough in Lunatic which resulted in a scuffed ending where I needed critical hits to finish Grima. I did a +speed/-skill Male Robin, Morrigan, Cordelia Lunatic+ run which seemed below par for that course. Maybe Cordelia with green statistics would have changed it from a scuffed victory to a solid one. I only mentioned the main characters I trained not the secondary healers/supports which were trained in all of these examples. Personally, it feels like if Chrom and Robin were not both loss conditions, there would be more viable options. Then again you need to train a Lord for the end anyway.
@@ScubaLuigi I think that might be close to hitting on the reason. The Fates games, especially Conquest, are some of the few in the series where actually beating the game at all is in question if you aren't experienced with them. For other Fire Emblem games, it's a given that the average player will be able to beat the game, so the community turned to arguing about "but how do you beat the game WELL?" In Fates, especially Conquest, people often seek out advice on how to beat the game and what builds help with that.
If all you care about is actually beating maps, generals are quite a valuable class to have around, and I love the dichotomy behind people's considerations.
And then there's tier lists, for which we as a community weirdly decide to take availability into account when comparing units against each other, rating "contribution" over "relative quality" which is just plain weird.
Tier lists are funny to me because I have FGC brain and when I see tier lists I think about characters purely in relation to each other in a vacuum, so when I see things like Alcryst so low on Engage tier lists, I'm like wtf?? His personal skill sucks but his unique class skill is broken, procs almost every combat and if you're using a brave bow can easily proc 3-4 times, letting him melt units who he'd otherwise do 0 damage to. Plus his spd and dex growths are excellent. Etie has nothing of that going for her, all she has is str, but I see people rate her higher than him quite a lot because, well, she's available from early on, if you keep using her her str *will* be enough to always do damage to even enemy armors (even if it's just chip damage,) and not using bow effectiveness before you get Alcryst is foolish and will cost you turns, so since you've already had to give Etie at least some exp, you might as well keep using her... Taking things like "how many of your limited resources in a speed/LTC run are you willing to spend on just *one* unit" into account is something I have to manually do. I get it once I think through it, but a lot of these things are just left unstated by a lot of people, or if not unstated, then underexplained.
Interesting you talk about "actually beating maps" and generals being good. Back when there were more maps with actual or effective turn limits, their low Mov made them useless. But now I agree with you, since most maps are route or seize objectives with very few having a turn limit. I think in Engage there are, like, only a few maps where you actually really want whatever's in some chest a thief is making a beeline for, and there are basically zero green units on the main chapters you actually want/need to save. Plus, armors being immune to the break mechanic in Engage really suddenly made Knights and Generals finally good. But still, they're only situationally useful in LTCs so everyone still shits on them. Pretty sad.
@@drewbabeGenerals are stuck in an interesting spot. They give great defense in games where you can pair-up. They can have enough defense where getting doubled does not kill in certain cases. Even before the ability Pavice or Aegis is added. Of course their resistance is lower than defense. It is an extreme example of physical defense.
Generals are also great if one wishes to use strategies that limit how much one can get RNG screwed during match-ups; unless its against a magician or a special weapon, a critical is unlikely to kill a general, and you don't have to worry about dodging. Why take unnecessary risks just to save a few turns, and why stick with a mediocre pre-promote in the last third of the game when generals make training un-promoted units that much easier?
I think the best points made in this video were the focus on the lack of a true definition for what “efficiency” actually is in a given context, as well as the related idea that unit discussion is only useful if everybody is operating under the same lens. While something like turn count is a nice ideal in theory, it is also kind of problematic to put into practice for tier lists, as units who might otherwise be not very useful can suddenly find themselves at the top of the list due to a forced deployment with limited slots. FE10 Edward is probably the poster boy for this type of oddity.
In a similar vein, time efficiency sounds nice due to giving more credence to strategies with high reliability and ease of use, though it has the possibly unintended knock on effect of encouraging gameplay which many might consider boring. It is incredibly easy for FE7 Oswin or Hector to near solo the game with minimal consideration on the part of the player, and while time efficient this certainly isn’t very exciting.
This isn’t meant to discredit either of those standards of efficiency, it just leads me to the actual point of my comment which agrees with the broader point of your video that clear standards need to be established at the beginning of any unit discussion post. Personally, I actually think the “vibes” definition that dips a little bit into the pool of both turn count and time efficiency is actually the most intuitive despite being the least objective. However, because it’s the least objective it isn’t particularly well suited for a strict tier list, so something like a character guide or unit by unit analysis is my preferred method of discussion for this topic in general. The vast majority of players do not care one iota about “efficiency”, and even the ones who say that they do often do not actually behave in such a way when they actually go and play the games themselves. It is much more helpful to discuss on a per-unit basis what they can do when given investment, and how much effort on the part of the player it takes to get them to that point, hence my preference for character guides.
Lots of rambling aside, the main point is that better communication by OPs is the biggest thing that needs to “change” in the community; as everyone will always have their own definition on what skilled play looks like, the best we can strive for is to make it clear which definition any given poster is talking about.
As someone who plays semi-efficient runs, I understand efficiency as "clearing the game with the least amount of unnecesary effort possible", which usually means relying the least possible on growth reliant units and not being afraid to use pre-promotes, specially in the late game, where underleved growth units are usually a pain in the butt to grind.
I’ve had the same stance on this since then and I’ll say it now discussing character viability is a lot easier than discussing an entire run with that particular character in use.
We seriously need unit averages back lmao
tl;dr people confuse using the best units for being good at video game.
8:05 Look mom, I'm on TV!
That post was TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO HOLY SHIT
When I first got into Fire Emblem back in the GBA days, the community consensus was that characters like Nino were top tier while characters like Marcus were trash. After about a decade, the consensus was the complete opposite.
I've learned 2 things from watching the discussion change over time.
1. Most people are just parroting the opinions of other people.
2. Unit tier lists are pretty irrelevant to most playthrus, so just use the units you enjoy.
I've scarcely had any interactions with the FE community, but this unending conversation around "efficiency" is what I'd've expected were I to participate in it. It's understandable, given that it's a tactical RPG notable for its difficulty. By necessity, people will try to figure out the optimal ways to approach the challenges therein. It seems people lose each other in the discussion when they either expect the experiences of other players to match their own, or lack the context of why strategies or arguments are presented as such. I'm not immune from this, I feel a gut-reaction to defend my boy Clanne whenever I saw him towards the bottom of most of the tier lists/character rankings presented in this video, but the fact that he carried me through my Normal difficulty playthrough doesn't mean much in the context of LTC runs or speedruns or whatever (it also doesn't help that I'm inherently against most tier lists, but that's a topic for another day). As you said towards the end of the video, it's important for context to be heeded when discussions like these arise. That example of the player who got flak for reclassing their Ivy was particularly frustrating to me, since I've seen similar attitudes towards 'non-standard' or 'inefficient' play in other communities I'm in. I feel like it does more to stifle creativity and innovation if everyone is expected to play the same way.
This video has made me realize that the reason I don't like meta discussions is because the people arguing are usually just shouting right past each other. Also I wouldn't call myself an efficient player per say, so I get sort of put off when entering a discussion cause I get very "this is the REAL way to play" vibes from other people a lot of the time.
I'd like to clarify my clarification at 28:55 in the second long form response.
I'm fine with discussing effeciency under any lens any person wants to use. I enjoy discussing IL LTCs.
Unfortunately, as you address later in the video many people do not explicate what they mean by "effecient" and only talk about what they personally did to beat the game. This means that on the whole "effeciency" as a monolithic concept is not defined. As another long form responder mentioned later in the video said; the closest definition of "efficient" is "minimum input for maximum output" which is what I meant by the Platonic ideal of "effeciency".
I enjoyed the video. You speak very clearly and are good with data. I'd enjoy seeing more data analysis and op eds from you.
As a Fire Emblem fan who frequently interacts with the Fire Emblem community; I do not talk about Fire Emblem. Ever.
I do not give opinions, I do not offer my experience, I do not say what units I do or do not use. It's not worth it. Being in the FE community means a silent agreement to never be a part of it.
Well then are you really a part of it? You don't have to be part of a fandom or community if you don't like them.
Ok so I'm not the only one lol. I often say I love Fire Emblem but I'm not an FE fan.
Never talk about video games in public ever
Yup same, especially if it's because I got stat blessed. Like I used Etie in Engage and never really had troubles with speed, but mentioning that she was one of my best units online would be like putting my hand in a bear trap
From my perspective, discussion that revolves around what's "best" while dismissing everything else as unusable is not only short-sighted but also simple-minded, and i would even go as far as to say that anyone who has to rely on what's "best" to beat Fire Emblem isn't as good at the game as they think they are.
Like if i want to have a discussion about how to make Etie work, and people just respond with "Alcryst/Amber is better", that's simply being unproductive. Like it's great if that's your opinion and all, but you're not adding anything of value to the discussion i'm trying to have. Just like that Ivy post shown in the video where the responses boiled down to "Lindwurm is best and nothing else is relevant".
I think this video also touched on what i've found to be the fundamental flaw of FE tier lists: ranking units based on an arbitrary metric (that usually isn't even clearly defined), and then deeming that because other units are worse at that particular thing they are worse _overall._ They overly focus on specific attributes or particular playstyles and then seek to imply that those are therefore the best attributes and playstyles. Like arguing that Kagetsu is better than Louis because Kagetsu can easily hit ORKO thresholds while completely ignoring that Louis simply laughs at all incoming physical dmg.
I absolutely agree that FE discussion would greatly improve if it revolved less around unit comparison and more around in-depth analysis of units individually.
Honestly about the part with seeing High Level Players Skills - Isn't it far more impressive to beat a game with the "worst" units rather than the best of the best? This term feels contradictary. Because yes, when comparing and tiering units the question of which units are the best should ve questioned. But just because someone uses a Jagen and a cast only made of very good unit doesnt automatically make them good players.
I'll say that there's definitely game knowledge being expressed when solving the puzzle that is "which strategies could I deploy to get some 'best' result?" Now, this doesn't (or at least, shouldn't) make someone a "better" player for executing the strategy. Like you referenced, players can also demonstrate game knowledge/skill when putting together strategies that don't achieve the same 'best' result, either due to using various restrictions, or even just having different goals entirely. Solving one type of puzzle doesn't necessarily make one person smarter than someone who solves a different type of puzzle. In some cases it could, but players shouldn't be so quick to label just a couple playstyles as "high level gameplay".
@@queenlyarts Ye it definitly is a good thing if you can figure these things out - but one compenent of that process involves either trying out every single unit over multiple runs or googling their growths and combining the knowledge gained. Making "Spoilers" the best way to play the games because especially those who dont research all that stuff wil l most likely fall in the category of those who achieved good results but are bad because they benched Jagen and used Myrmidon 1 over Myrmidon 2. I wonder what 99% of the people discussing this did.
And no, I dont think its a bad thing to look up ingame information to rate units. It is ik fact nessecary. But I've never seen someone adressing this because, like discussions themselves, it has become a Standard. Meaning among those who get called bad are people who didnt even know these factors are a thing. They will quickly learn them but, like the Jagen pitfall, it could impact their grow as a player into a false direction due to others saying that characters A/B are objectively bad and not possible to make good (or at least make it sound that way)
Great video btw! I personally like the idea of Mekkahs unit stonks because it allows you to take growth averages and ressources into account and to take a deeper look into units performance
I think a key part of understanding why efficiency came to be so prominent is that it was used as a razor in unit tier lists. Because games often allow for degenerate strategies such as unlimited grinding, most units can reach max level and reach any benchmark. So, a standard is needed to better distinguish good and bad units, which came to be efficiency.
While ETC calculations may be "complex" to a lot of people, it is an intuitive enough metric that you can usually guesstimate where things are. You only really need to whip out the calculations if there's a serious disagreement.
I think that avoiding degenerate strategies isn't a global standard either. If you are doing an Iron Man run for example and one of your main contributors dies, using an exploit or degenerate strategy to recover from that mistake is fair game, skillful, "efficient" even. So in this context knowing which units are more easily exploitable is much more important than knowing which ones save me turns or resources.
I guess all of these concepts are nebulous and no definition of efficiency nor any part of it can be really universally applicable to most of the common goals of a Fire Emblem run.
@@SeleccionMakiliI think you misunderstood my point. If you for example boss grind a unit to max EXP, well most units grinded to max EXP perform fairly well. There rarely are units that can't be grinded up, especially at the time efficiency became the dominant metric. Accounting for such strategies tends to level all units to the same floor and makes discussion pointless.
Not all ironman runs consider degenerate strategies as acceptable. It will depend on the runner.
I've always found it weird how the efficiency people don't consider real time and/or cognitive load as part of efficiency. Like if a grind takes 5 minutes and 100 turns, characters that get access to said grind would be way better than characters who don't.
Great Video!
This whole topic is honestly the biggest reason I'm not that involved with the community, as efficiency is such an extremely subjective topic, especially in a game with so many variables as Fire Emblem. There is no "standard" unless you go for LTC and speedruns. To me efficiency isn't a show of skill. True Fire Emblem skill is how you handle an almost guaranteed loss. I once played a FE8 hack and was extremely underleveled for the final boss and strategized for like 2 hours to figure out how to do it without losing a unit. It's the most accomplished I ever felt playing FE. Playing efficiently never made me feel skilled. It's just looking up strategies others made and follow them, maybe figure a few things you can improve, and that's it. But in the end, it's just about what you have most fun with, just don't be a dick about it. Nobody should care this much how others view or play the games.
Yeah, this is most fundamentally a language problem. I don't think anyone would have an issue with pretty much any of this if they were just called Reliable LTCs. It's pretty much the claiming of the word efficient in a strategy game while only adhering to a very narrow interpretation of the word. Within that subcategory of FE play there will still be some stuff up for debate on what reliable really means and how to measure it, but that I think is a purely internal issue to work out.
How it feeds into other issues like character strength discussions or tier lists, or questionably presented topics like "pitfalls" that often apply to other types of play is its own can of worms, so I wont really bother with that stuff.
I basically wrote this comment out as I watched the video, and obviously a lot of the things I touch on will be points of disagreement, those are the main things to reply to and sitting there typing "I agree", but I don't want the tone of this comment to be completely negative, so I want to start out by saying this is really well made, I think you articulate and deliver your points and arguments really well, the editing was really clean, and I think in general the topic of discussion was a really interesting one which is always great to get more perspective on.
I think you should be really proud of this video, and I hope it kickstarts some much deserved growth for your channel. I am absolutely interested in seeing more long form discussion videos from you. Stellar job, and genuinely well done. This is excellent content.
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This topic is one I find really interesting, and have discussed a couple of times myself. Before watching, I want to preface by saying that whilst I enjoy and value efficiency as a metric, and it's one I have used myself in the past, I also find it quite odd how dominant it's become in terms of where discussion has gone surrounding Fire Emblem units. There are a lot of different metrics from which to discuss the viability of units, but anything that isn't efficiency seems incredibly rare.
I'm initially confused by the example of "Bad discussion" around the units at around the 0:40 second mark. They seem to be a lot of well articulated and polite discussion, apart from the one guy calling people "Elitists" in the Amelia example. As far as I see it, polite, well informed and well articulated discussion from varying viewpoints regarding gameplay mechanics is almost the pinnacle of what any video game discussion could really hope to reach, especially for single player strategy RPGs. I'm not at all denying that the discussions can get toxic - they absolutely can - but I don't think the examples you picked really showcase that.
I think there is a bit of a misconception being made here that playing for efficiency = thinking you are more skilled, which personally, I don't think a lot of efficiency oriented players have a mindest of. It's just the way they like to play and/or discuss the game.
Really like that you break down Efficiency into different sub categories, and that even outside of these, everyone has their own definitions.
I disagree with "High Level" gameplay exclusive meaning efficiency - I feel like it is mostly used to reference those who are very well versed or skilled in any particular playstyle - whether that be efficiency or otherwise (Ironmans, 0% Growths, etc).
This survey is really cool, really nice set of data to have, and think you asked some very interesting questions.
One thing I *massively* agree with you on is that we all need to do a much better job of defining and framing the context of the discussions we have.
One of the comments for that "Ivy" example seems to just be answering the prompt of the question and I'm not quite sure why it was showcased. The thread asked what people did with Ivy and they just answered.
I think that a lot of people who discuss the games from an efficiency perspective get branded as "Trying to tell other people how to play" when they... aren't, they are just discussing their own method of playing, and a lot of that gets showcased in this video.
40:51 - Could not agree more and is something I have been actively pushing to try and do, with discussions that avoid unit comparison entirely with the "Breaking Down" series for FE3H. Discussing a units strategies, use cases, and 'builds' doesn't require comparison to other units, and is something I have personally really enjoyed.
Banger video, love it, keep it up.
Thank you! I'll admit that some of examples don't read as clearly supporting my arguments, and that's largely because of my takeaway that words have meaning beyond what is directly said. I spent a lot of time reading through posts from the past, posts made within the last couple weeks, and all hundred or so free responses from my survey. I basically had something to say about every comment I read, but for the sake of making a concise video (albeit still pretty long at 45 minutes), I had to just kind of categorize the posts under the broad takeaways that I had, and present them when discussing that takeaway. Each post deserves its own analysis in my opinion, but that's obviously not feasible. I also have the bias of knowing what I mean when I present a post to support a claim, so I don't blame you for the critique.
My thought process for "efficiency = skilled" being the standard has two points. For one, some players overtly refer to efficiency as high level gameplay, either in that specific term or in using phrases that have the same implication. The other point is that with efficiency being the standard metric for most discussions, players who come into discussions with other metrics in mind are told that "they can play however you want" and "don't let this stop you from having fun". These are nice thoughts, but they imply that playing outside an efficient context, or wanting to use other metrics for discussions, would be for fun rather than an expression of skill. I don't think this means we should say players aren't skilled for achieving their goal of efficiency, but rather that we should give more opportunities for players to be recognized for expressing skill in contexts that don't have a strict measurement for success. One way of being more inclusive in this manner would be different formats for gameplay discussion, which I appreciate you recognizing and actively encouraging.
Of course, this is largely just my interpretation, but I think it's worth considering looking past what is directly said. Communication is really tricky in online spaces, after all.
Unfortunately, you are unlikely to find much conversation which falls into the category of your ideals. What you are talking about is the topic of discussion exceeding that of meta and moving into what I call high meta. In every game I have found getting to the level of high meta to be a daunting task. Those in the community cannot handle non-standard discussion so this results in me eventually giving up on a community and moving to another. If you want the conversation you are looking for you need to be willing to continuously respond to an individual to allow the discussion to progress in level. Too many just see the discussion is not up to their standards/not to their liking and move on.
Fantastically put together video on a topic that a lot of people fail to talk about in as much depth as it deserves seeing how fundamental it is to so many discussions in the community. I look forward to seeing what you put out next!
Efficiency is finding 2 characters that look cute together and making them kiss and have a baby.
me and my 3DS wife
Awakening and Fates in a nutshell
@@juniorvasquez93and FE4
@@jouheikisaragi6075 correct
Interesting! I'm working on a Fire Emblem video right now myself, and this video definitely has me thinking about how I might frame the language of my writing a bit differently. I agree that making efforts to keep discussions more inclusive is an important aspect of fostering a good community. Thanks for the valuable insights!
Pretty good video. I don't agree with everything, but I think there's something for everyone to take away from this video, agree or disagree.
I do think there's definite value in tiering units, and that efficiency is the most sensible way to do so; it was never done because it's the most "valid" way to play, but because it's a way to rank units without the issue of factoring in grinding, because grinding makes all units overpowered, and at that point the lists become even more lopsided. When I joined the community back when Awakening was new, I received the same kind of stifling tiering discussion in the other direction, being told things like how Olivia is the optimal partner for Chrom due to being the best way to pass Galeforce to Lucina, never mind the enormous wall of grinding needed to do so. Tiering is not meant to demean, and using a bad unit doesn't make you less skilled, much like how using a top tier in a fighting game doesn't make you better. It's just the most efficient way to tackle the specific type of play the tier list covers.
So uh...yeah, like you said, just don't be a dick lmao
This video came off as really soapboxy to me since I personally view the issue as not existent, but I will say that unit analysis videos are really fun. JonoabboFE's 3 Houses videos are pretty good since they highlight what a unit is particularly good at while also not having an issue pointing out their glaring flaws.
Great vid, totally identify with a lot of this. Often times i dont even bother participating in discussions anymore bc my strategies are almost always not the meta, and it just makes me feel like im bad FE and not as skilled despite beating the game on the same difficulty as others.
Same. The only game where you need to find the right units and the right class for those units is Three Houses, but the rest of the games are honestly pretty lax with what units you use or how many you keep or lose. I lost Shiida almost immediately in my Hard*5 Shadow Dragon playthrough, yet I beat the game.
@@michaellane4054I tried to play Shadow Dragon managing to beat the game on normal, t1, t2,, t3, and I got into late game in T4. After trying to crunch numbers I realized that Barst has similar potential to Sedgar and...the other broken growth character. Though, due to his recruitment chapter, base statistics, growths, all factors fit one definition of the best character in the game. I unfortunately gave up trying since my attempts were not going anywhere.
@@lanceknightmare In all honesty, I definitely got lucky. I had no idea what I was doing.
Enjoying efficient play and discussing efficient play being positively correlated makes sense. However, I'm surprised to see that those who didn't enjoy playing efficiently tended not to view efficiency as a form of skill. I don't like playing LTCs, but even I view LTC efficiency as reliant on game knowledge and decision-making, both of which I view as skill for an FE game.
Beyond that, you're right to say efficiency is goal-based, so it makes sense that people's views on efficiency will differ. Mindful clarity is not everyone's strong point, so I don't expect vague or presumptuous value statements to stop popping up, but I do hope to see it have some impact.
Yeah I included the enjoy playing vs. discussing comparison because the basic graphs for each weren't really informative on their own, and now we at least have some data that supports the correlation, as simple of an observation it may be.
As for viewing efficiency as a form a skill, I honestly hadn't thought about it the way you described until now. It makes sense that players would view their own playstyle as skilled, but I suppose that doesn't always mean the other way of thinking is true. As you mentioned, I think a lot of players, even those not interested in playing LTC, respect the effort that goes into LTC, but for some reason, this doesn't hold true for efficiency in this survey. My speculation is that some players responded negatively towards efficiency as a form of skill to state that it's not the *only* way of expressing skill. Then again, I also have seen comments/responses boiling down LTC to being more luck-reliant than skill-reliant, so I'm sure there's just a lot of variance as to the reasoning behind certain trends.
Changing the behavior of a large online community is obviously very tricky, but I've at least read a few comments saying that this has made them reconsider how they'll talk in the future, so I know it's at least had a non-zero amount of impact.
I don’t like the whole stigma that playing efficiently is better. It feels like whenever discussion is had about character viability, it is always centered around efficiency.
It is never stated in the game that playing faster is better (maybe tactician rank?)
To me, the efficiency conversation sounds like. a group of people placing restrictions on themselves and believing they are better at the game because they can play within their pretense.
It’s fine if that’s how you want to play the game, but don’t act like your way of playing the game is superior or more skillful than others.
Reminds me of how Old School RuneScape has become so efficiency crazy.
I think one part of typical efficiency discussions that is strangely ignored is turns lost to resetting. Let’s use something like FE6 as a reference for example.
Which is more efficient:
(A) Spending 30 extra turns at the end of a chapter to grind supports for Lance and Allen so that they give each other a boost to hit rate.
(B) Having to reset a later chapter 15 turns in because Lance missed on a crucial turn and died, and then having to reset another later chapter on turn 15 for the same reason.
I’d personally count them both the same. I understand that the theoretical best run doesn’t need to waste turns grinding supports, but if all we ever care about is doing things “the best”, then why don’t we just rig the RNG? For me, the appeal of Fire Emblem is taking semi-random elements and board states and having to figure out safe ways to make progress (i.e. completing chapters, achieving side objectives, strengthening units). If we get too bogged down in which strategies might work to save a handful of turns throughout the game if I brute force this 80% chance to hit and that 30% chance to dodge, then I think that loses a lot of what makes the game interesting.
Great Video, you've earned yourself a sub 🎉🎉🎉
I will preface this by saying however - I am a causal player. I play for fun and don't "care" about efficient play. I routinely grind supportd and use objectively bad characters because I like to.
But I personally uphold efficient play for various reasons.
Firstly, "Efficiency" is defined as how close you are to maximizing one's resources (Be it deployment slots, turns, items, experience, or real life time) while minimizing costs and wastage.
That is an objective definition. Because the broad goal of all playthroughs is to "beat the game" (whether LTC, 0% growths, Iron Man, etc), efficiency in this context always broadly refers to "beating the game" with minimal wastage of resources.
Yes, an iron man will change the fundamentals of how you approach the game and what is or isn't "efficient" given you have narrower parameters to work with, but the actual definition of "efficient" doesn't change.
In almost every playthrough, Nino requiring tons of training, slowing your army down, and realistically never reaching Pent's A rank Staves in lieu of the effort used is inefficient. There is not a single scenario Nino being used is "efficient" use of resources, even if you have the resources to train her.
Lyn being unable to retaliate at 1-2 range makes her objectively inefficient at clearing groups of enemies with 1-2 range compared to someone with weaker offense but the ability to retaliate at 1-2 range. These are objective metrics that cannot be spun, because she not only clears the group of enemies slower, she by definition, clears the map slower and thus the game slower.
As for the case against grinding, firstly, not only it is "inefficient" in terms of real time and turn count, equalizing the playing field has the effect of making everyone good. At that point, virtually everyone can "efficiently" beat the game (save for bow and sword locked units). If a unit could do the same thing as a heavily grinded unit can do after said grinding, then that unit performs more efficiently in all contexts, with or without grinding. In fact, grinding only proves the point because it demonstrates that everyone can crush when trained infinitely, but not the reverse.
Hardest difficulty assumed is where we get contentious. Much like LTC, Speedrun, or 0% growths, I see game mode difficulty as just a set of parameters the player has to work with. I.e. what is "efficient" in Normal vs Hard isn't always the same, just like how Ironman vs 0% growths may favour different units. The common linkage is you're still trying to beat the game, but the constraints placed become different. I.e. Rutger is notably better in Hard Mode because his overkill offense is necessary for efficient play in a player-phase game mode like FE6 Hard. In Normal Mode, he comparatively is worse off because the benefits he brings to the table are not as unique or necessary. However, in both modes using him is a more efficient allocation of resources than Fir, who requires more training and joins at a point in the game where overkill offense becomes less important for efficient play.
I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts! And yes - I am actually a casual, save state abusing player. But I respect efficiency as an objective standard and metric for the aforementioned reasons.
I want to add that efficiency does, in fact, demonstrate skill, because it requires significant game knowledge to maximize resources and minimize costs.
Efficient play is not inherent, it's a skill that must be learned. I am not saying that grinding a weak unit up and taking effort to shield them from harm doesn't take skill - it absolutely does, but the degree of skill expression needed are not the same.
Efficient play also requires the same skills of protecting weaker units, or covering the weaknesses of flier units, etc. In addition to resource maximization and cost minimization.
In other words, an efficient player is likely to be able to turtle and grind a weak unit up, but a casual player is unlikely to be able to play efficiently without Developing a mindset for it.
Most people would agree hitting the load save state button everytime a unit dies in the arena or elsewhere takes no skill. People agree that checking enemy ranges and calculating damage and making educated decisions demonstrates basic understanding of FE Mechanics.
So now we need something to differentiate. Different playstyles and player attitudes are fine and should be respected, but it doesn't make the difficulty of each the same.
Some playstyles require more game knowledge, planning, and experience to pull off. And efficient play requires more skill than grinding a weak unit, which in turn takes more skill than loading a save state every time your unit dies.
They're not the same. I feel as if it does a disservice to people who have actually put in the time to learn the games mechanics at a high level to equate the them.
@@marktam4983Playing efficiently demonstrates the opposite as well.
There is merit to running the best as they are the best and having such game knowledge, but it in turn makes the game significantly easier. It's the same effect as playing very slow and safe.
More skill is demonstrated by using lesser optimal strats. Skilled players can do more than meta-gamed fast strats or turtle paced ironmans. It's part of the problem with the community promoting the idea of those kind of challenge runs, it's skip the actual stage of experimenting very heavily and learning a lot about the game.
But personally I think skills a bad way to look at it anyway. More so being really good at fire emblem is more about familiarity with the series and specific game.
@@coldeed I would argue that minmaxing the game does require tedious experimentation to best come up with strategies to efficiently beat the game, however.
We tend to only see the outcome of LTC/Efficient play, rather than the planning that goes into it, which demonstrates skill itself.
Don't get me wrong however, I am pretty sure some LTCers/Efficiency -First players would be flustered with some maps if the restriction of no Warp Staff or no Flier utility was tacked on. So in that instance i would agree that "Efficient" play has compromised their ability to employ other strategies.
In all honesty, however, skill in Fire Emblem is pretty hard to measure. Given the time-insensitive, the static PVE nature of the game, and the ability to soft reset or load a savestate, plenty of weaknesses can be covered up with real life time.
I would personally propose a definition of measuring fire emblem skill as being able to optimally respond to situations that the player has not encountered before, without consulting pre-existing strategies that are shown to be highly effective, thereby placing the burden on the player to use their understanding of base fire emblem mechanics to come up with an optimal strategy on the spot.
Nice video, I don't necesarrily agree with everything, but the common consensus of "don't be a dick" is something I do vibe with.
Just curious because I can't recall, did that final hot take about talking about efficiency being inefficient come from me or am I dreaming. :')
Yes, that was coming from you! Thanks for the great response haha. I originally intended to put usernames next to their comments, but I ultimately decided against it, not wanting to put anyone on blast for representing problematic issues, and stuck with crediting everyone together at the end.
@@queenlyarts Good choice in the end, even though people tend to reply in good faith some submissions stood in stark contrast so adding usernames would probably have caused a bit of contention haha.
Anyway, glad you liked it and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this, and more productive discussion!
Funny enough I am actually agree with the input output model you sort of critiqued towards the end of the video. My issue is how dishonest it's use has been. Input of investement to outout of performance is fine. The fact this may harm trainees isn't even an issue to me. But often in these discussions "performance" is poorly defined and then falls back on nebulous predictions of turn counts in their "golden run". This even though at times you could argue the output for player ease is better on one unit, but again when things get hard, turns are used as an easy way out.
What you described is actually exactly the point I was trying to get across! Looking back, I suppose I didn't make it the most clear that I was presenting the model as a good method of analysis, not critiquing it. When I said "this has not been the case" I was referencing that players are not upfront (dishonest) about its use case. If a player described a trainee's level of efficiency under this model, it could be legitimately argued to be accurate, but this shouldn't necessarily speak to anything greater.
@@queenlyarts ah well didn't realise it, ya that makes more sense.
I think proficiency and LTCs are all well and good… but I’m always most impressed when players restrict their own resources. I.E. No Somniel chaplenge in Engage, No Recruit run of Echoes, Commoner only runs of Three Houses, Etc. Of course I think people should play however they want, with whatever units they want and just… enjoy the game :)
43:09 This chart is super interesting, and is eye-opening to me in explaining why I like Anna: I really enjoy using her in the "early-game 1-2 range Chain Attack filler" and "Radiant Bow Warrior" roles, both of which require the least investment. I'm not an LTC player and generally enjoy "zero to hero" units like Jean, but the roles I find Anna most useful in happen to be the easiest for her to fill, so her flaws aren't as notable to me as for someone with a different playstyle.
As for WHY I like her in these roles, I just really like Chain Attacks, especially early in Maddening, and for Warrior it's just so FUN seeing her slice through Wyverns and Generals like butter. Other bow users can oneshot fliers and mages one-round generals, but Anna is one of the few who can do both at once without reclassing, the only other one who comes to mind is Fogado and he joins a lot later. It gives her a unique identity as a unit that I appreciate. (I do wish her Luck was better, since her personal skill is garbage despite being potentially useful in a game with limited gold)
To this day I find funny how grinding Seliph to promotion to pop off and destroy genealogy gen 2 is good and optimal but using Anna with Micaiah to heal and get her to lvl 10 to then pop off as an amazing combat unit is unrealistic and wrong
As a huge Genealogy fan I find it funny that people even want to trivialize the game that badly. Like, you can deploy every unit in the game anyway, who cares. My Seliph didn't even promote until like chapter 7 and it didn't really hinder me.
@@dyrr836 every single gen 2 unit is absolutely broken so yeah
One has a horse and one doesnt, that's all apparently
@@inconemay1441 but Anna's beat class is mage knight, so both get a horse
As someone who only plays on normal mode and likes to take my time with clearing each map, I don't even try to start discussions in the community because I know my opinions would immediately get shut down lol.
meanwhile me when playing my first fire emblem (PoR) : Ahah Mist and Rolf go brrrrr
Same :D
In conclusion, theres over 30+ characters I and many others can use throughout each game in the series. Each with their own quirks and personality. They're characters people can get attached to and be able to use in their playthrough.
Besides the idea of Ninas or Amelias or the modern progidy unit is to give you a challenge of Zero to Hero as theyre arguably strong once they're trained and become staple once you make it to promotion. I think everyone can remember that feeling of finally leveling up a progidy unit enough to finally promote them and can now fend for themselves, its a wildly satisfying challenge to give a go.
My biggest take away is that the wide character selection gives everyone a different experience. I mean imagine a madman telling you he had all three trainee units, Ross, Amelia, and Ewan trained up to their maximum potential without exploiting tower. Now that's cool. In conclusion, fuck you random redditor I'm using the Villager.
Ewan aside I may or may not be that madman, not as uncommon as you might think
By prodigy do you mean like Ricken which is a talented yet inexperienced Mage in Fire Emblem Awakening.
Loved this.
Got back into my gba games after a Hiatus post twitter blow up finally.
They are my comfort food.
Subbed
I don't find "optimally efficient" playthroughs fun. Unit builds trend toward homogeneity, research on chapters is favored over improvisation, and any unit requiring investment is benched. These undermine the fun for me, often under the premise that they are "objectively" better. But the objective for me is FUN -- so why would obey arbitrary rules that drain the fun from my play?
Nice video, I hope that this video will encourage unit discussion
Eh, my take on this discussion is that it's really weird. People who talk about efficiency I feel are (usually) being taken way too seriously by the majority. Just because a person recognizes an efficient character, doesn't mean that they're saying you need to use them, or that you're even a bad player for using the bottom character. They simply display the data and state the takeaway. At the end of the day, it ain't that deep. "efficient play" is how you safely get from the prologue of any given game to the end of the final chapter with the lowest amount of risk and time spent. The fact that it's been proven that grinding is virtually never necessary (Except maybe 3H because it's sorta built around the training? That one's an anomaly) ,is why I think it's never taken into account when determining a unit's viability. As Mekkah has put it before, "Well if x character gets to grind, so does y character, and when everyone just gets to grind, then everybody is just at the same level, and there is no interesting discussion." At least that's what I've come to believe? That's what most tier lists and opinions are trying to say...and also the "elitists" usually are very chill people that don't actually adhere to the efficiency of a unit in their runs, most of the time they just enjoy the discussion. Casual players or semi-casual (Nothing wrong inherently with being these things) more often than not get up in arms though because the way they like to play the game isn't taken into account...when that's not what fits into the discussion. It's like being a lover of coffee and showing up to a tea convention to be mad that nobody there is talking about coffee.
efficiency is lame and overrated. grinding gordin to level 20 on chapter 1 is where it's at 😤
The way I rate my units is measuring how easy they make the game to me and how easy it is for other units to take thier niche, beating them with the same build or otherwise (like how a facetank, nostank and avoidtank all do crowd control with different stats).
If anything, my bias are towards reliable strats for Ironman runs. Thus I don't care wasting turns if that means earning more exp, wexp, or support points.
Efficiency and elitism are what plague the FE community. Like, I just wanna have fun using the characters I enjoy, playing at a difficulty I enjoy. I shouldn't be lectured or seen as less for doing that
LTC players: Play in a niche style barely anybody bothers to play.
Also LTC players: Try to make all gameplay discussions revolve entirely around their niche playstyle.
My personal goal is to just experience as much of a given game as I can. I go slow when I can and only rush when I have to. Support conversations were added to the game to encourage people taking their time to get to know the characters that interest them.
As somebody who's been around since before "efficiency" was a thing in the community(mostly lurking silently), what people used to do most of the time in gameplay discussions was give advice for new players on approaches that would work safely(make sure to level up more than one unit, don't neglect your lords, stuff that isn't super fast to beat the game, but will get you through it eventually regardless). Then, as with a great many series their main version of speedrunning(in FE this was LTC) started growing in popularity, and fans of the style started squeezing out most other forms of gameplay discussion, saying turn efficiency was clearly the most objective measure of any given unit or strategy. Eventually this more or less squeezes out everyone but the top few players(based on popular perception) and their fans who agree with them.
It happened in FE, it happened in KH, one by one it came for basically every series I hold dear, and now they're all at least semi-toxic cesspools that oft chase off would be community members before they've even said 3 things.
something that always strikes me with strategy people is that they forget that efficiency in other domains also often means minimal effort or energy. Specifically in fencing/fighting/martial arts you want to reduce the energy needed for the same results by improving your techniques and stances. In that regard spending dozens of minutes per turn can appear less efficient than someone who spends some more turns to make subsequent fights easier. Or in other words what makes grinding some levels less efficient than grinding your brain? I think you questioned the predominant ideas of efficiency well in this video.
Disregarding how someone plays a video game as “just for fun” is beyond funny. If you’re not having fun why are you playing?
So I have a lot to say on this topic of efficiency and how it has completely for a lack of tact FUCKED discussion, especially for my favorite game of all time Genealogy of the Holy War. In that game yes the maps are huge, but because of the current metrics of how fast a map needs to be completed (Which FE4 is not about) people are just like "Oh if you have a horse top of the list? No horse? Garbage" missing the complete nuance of FE4 that I actually discussed in a video long ago.
Another thing that this efficiency discussion has kinda fucked over is that when a new game comes out for the series now nobody likes to experiment with units. We just apply the same mentality and then some units get unused, when really in my opinion for a first run you should TRY EVERYONE. Because who knows, you may find out that someone like Louis is actually a great unit despite your jugular about to burst and cause internal bleeding from me even suggesting that. Overall FE is a series about PERSONAL EXPERIENCE and not a "Correct" way to play.
I've noticed a few opinions on units did change in Engage as time went on and people experimented, e.g Etie is now considered about equal to Alcryst and Alfred is considered, while not amazing, not horrible anymore. (Partly because people knee-jerked that cavalry were bad in Engage, then realized how good Cavalry Bonded Shield is)
But I totally agree on FE4. I personally think playing it fast is missing the point, but whenever I try to argue that I get hit with "BUT there's a turncount ranking!" And I'm just like... the turn limits for the best rank are pretty lenient from what I can tell. They definitely don't expect you to bench every foot unit.
@@BigKlingy Yeah they really don’t. I also will say, the ranking system was FEs worst mistake in my opinion. Because people turned it into gospel on how to play.
@@greatrieck It's funny because so few FE games have rankings, and "efficiency" players tend to hate FE7's ranking system because its Funds rank rewards hoarding powerful weapons, promotion items and stat boosters.
My belief has always been: if I want to care about rankings, I'll play Advance Wars.
@@BigKlingy Which I don’t care for admittedly for reasons like that and I liked the permadeath FE has. But I do see the appeal
@@BigKlingy That's right, AW units are disposable, while FE ones don't
While watching speed runs in some games can be entertaining I have negative desire to actually attempt any speed running myself. Personally I love iron man runs in FE. Each death creates a void for a new character you never would have dreamed of using but you may end up loving because all you needed was to give them a chance.
Hey, I'm in the video (bottom response @24:30). Interesting that my actual position would probably be more Turns Efficiency.
To expand on my point (now that I've thought about it more) I would say that a murky definition of efficiency better suits the qualitative discussion of a tier-list. For example, if one were to properly 'measure' efficiency (addressing the bottom point @37:04) in terms of turn count deltas, tier lists would simply become a record of who would and wouldn't be used (and to what extent) in the 'best' LTC (or ETC) strategies and playthroughs. This would render tier lists useless as a means of discussion for more general playthroughs, e.g. Kent would be E-tier in a no-LM HHM LTC FE7 play-through because you would never use him over Sain let alone Lowen, and he has minimal contributions in his join chapter.
For this reason I prefer the murkier 'Fast Play' definition where to attempts to make all discussion extremely specific and objective, or to turn units into turn count deltas, are rejected, as it allows discussion of an imo more interesting topic, which is e.g. "What if you used Kent in a no-LM HHM FE7 playthrough instead of or in addition to Lowen, while not taking 30 turns on every map". However, as players gain more information about each game, further refine their strategies, and perfect LTC playthroughs, this sort of more objective discussion is perhaps inevitable.
As for ETC, while I've been out of the tier list meta for about a year (haven't played engage, that SoV episode put me off Mekkah's tier list videos, playing Kaga Saga games which have barely any discussion online), reading up on all the threads I've seen it only discussed in the context of LHM as a proof-of-concept, despite it being 10 years old. I doubt anyone bringing ETC up as the 'current' means by which they rate 'efficient' tier lists has actually evaluated the exact ETC turn count of a single Engage play-through, let alone the multiple iterations that would be needed for a tier list; but maybe they're doing this in the discords that I'm not browsing.
Efficiency is one thing but imagine mentioning casual mode to Fire Emblem player, that stuff is hilarious.
This video was awesome. Thanks so much for doing the work
I feel efficiency makes sense as a standard of discussion. Obviously not everyone is going to play that way, I don't play efficiency and generally prefer a slower playthrough training up my favorites, and I'm certain many others do as well. But it just makes sense that say, a unit that requires less investment and contributes in a meaningful way earlier on is better than a unit that joins later and doesn't contribute as much. Same with a unit that comes combat ready compared to a unit that needs a lot of investment before they snowball.
I do auxiliary maps to catch up lower level units and use a diverse array of classes because I find that more interesting. I was surprised when I first started watching FE content to learn that I guess all infantry but especially armors and archers are terrible. In my experience, almost every unit has been viable and most were actively useful, at least since I started playing with Awakening.
I've played every fire emblem released in the West except PoR (didnt know it existed until I was playing Radiant Dawn).
Pre-promoted units are necessary for efficiency play, but I always figured they were just there to baby me until I got good at the game
Efficiency is a scam. People like to think that by virtue of beating maps fast they are better at the game but we live in an age where information is online so I can mirror any LTCer's run and achieve the same results with zero player knowledge if that entire playthrough is online.
It is like theorycrafting MTG decks, once the good decks are theorycrafted, it becomes common knowledge within the meta what is good and why, and players simply need to mimic those decks to win. In the case of Fire Emblem, mirroring the best units/tactics that are known in the speedrun/LTC communities will drastically improve your outcome if not beat the maps for you.
The lack of dynamic AI/responses to what the player is doing produces solved puzzles in a way where at some point skill evaporates and it just becomes an issue of applied knowledge to win positions. In Chess, knowledge can win games vs skill, as knowing opening traps your opponent does not know can let you LTC them.
Skill is difficult to measure in strategy games, especially when AI does the same thing so anyone with knowledge can seem skilled. It isn't like observing a god in an FPS game who has clear mechanical skill that other players do not. You can kind of figure out how good someone is across multiple runs that have not been tested by observing their ability to theorycraft on the spot or produce winning positions rapidly, but ultimately none of these games are pvp/competitive and it is just a thing to do for fun for the people who want to LTC/Speed run.
Knowledge IS a form of skill. I don't think it's good to brush it off as being unskilled cause you're just repeating a sequence someone else figured out for you. But it's definitely not the only form of skill, and it's importance vary depending on the environnement.
The focus on LTC or even speedrun as showcasing fire emblem skill ignores the different type of strategical skill you might need to beat the game blind for exemple (suddenly having a general that can hold a chokepoint and hold off 5 waves of unexpected reinforcement seems like a good idea if you don't know if that's on the table or not).
Even something like crafting compelling character arc for the units in your party by adapting to what's happening in the game could be considered a form of skill, skill in an artistic expression rather than mechanical skill but it's still something not everyone will be able to do nonetheless and it tend to get devalued by the community as being more "casual" but someone can be just as invested in that as they are in the tactical aspect, it's a tactical roleplaying game after all, the roleplaying part has value too. It's weird that people can acknowledge that easily in a game like D&D but not in a game like fire emblem despite the game being designed to create such stories.
Well I got a bit sidetracked but point is, I think any way to engage with an activity that involves learning and improving can be considered a skill and I wish we'd encourage a variety of ways of engaging with the game rather than devaluing the thing we don't personally engage with.
32:45 Hey, thats me! I’m the one in the blue that made the post about fe7-fe8 paladins, and I’d be curious in what way you would consider it overcorrection.
I meant to point out your comment as the interesting observation of overcorrection, not to say that you were the one overcorrecting, I apologize if that didn't read clearly! I agree that certain "bad" takes have been overcorrected, such as your example with early promoting. It may not have been great for players to push promoting at LV20, but saying that early promoting is the correct choice and that late promoting is "bad" is perhaps a bit much. You can certainly give advice as to which to do, but it really would just depend on the context.
The term new players is misused commonly in the Fire Emblem community among other communities. The term new player in the context which is being used means you still can not beat the game reliably, your completion still requires probability example(you need to dodge 2 times in x level or score 3 critical hits at specific times to complete x level). Someone who has beaten a game deserves to be regarded as a skill level of 2, while someone who has not completed a game regarded as a skill level of 1. The new player definition drags on being used to describe an exessively wide skill range of players to the point where the one using the term new player is being both illiterate and toxic at the same time.
Sounds like FE fans have a dandori issue where they don't know how to just go and smell the roses and enjoy the game at a slower pace. Honestly i think its lame if you use one class too much and only having one wyvern Lord in 3 houses for example will be far more fun as well as i might end up doing this with Engage one of these times to avoid saturation and homogenization. The standards for efficiency is really lame as a standard. If you can make a unit work who really cares beyond tierlists?
Jagen, jagens, and sometimes the first team always accompany my mc. Even on hardest difficulty. Fcuk “efficiency”.
I really like this video and the way you elaborate on the points. A lot of it is indeed subjective but I do think we need to call a spade a spade every now and then.
Take an example of Nino since it seems to be always the topical point.
In an LTC scenario, nino is not very good. In a completionist run, nino is not very good (due to having to reset due to her dying). In a "relatively fast" playthrough, Nino is not very good due to taking time to grow. The only scenario in which nino is good is if you wanna cap stats and juggernaut, but it's more than proven that other units have this capability without as much investment. The ultimate point is , no matter how you judge it, nino is not very good. Failing to acknowledge that or ignore that is not us fostering a community that is more inclusive, but INHERENTLY allowing incorrect statements to be made to appease some individuals. The truth is: People have to grow some thick skin. A unit being deemed bad is not a personal attack on the person, but more of a statement regarding the units itself. There are always ways to salvage units and use them, but it doesn't necessarily derive them to "good". And if there isn't a metric that people can compare by or take into account, then what's the point of even discussing? If every unit is the best, then are any of them truly the best?
All players being "equally wrong" is the same absolute statement you are trying to prevent to begin with. There are BETTER LTCer's within the community amongst themselves. There are better grinding players within the community. There are better completionist players. Albeit they're all different, there's no denying that within those (aformentioned) categories, the distinction of tiering characters still do exist and are very much based upon a logical approach to each different type of gamestyle with metrics set by the community. Albeit it's not a 12 page signed and sealed contract, agreements are implied within that playerbase without having to derive every little detail (such as if you're true LTCer for New Mystery, you don't really care if certain units have to die, even more so, you probably want that for optimal speed runs). You can't compare LTC to completionist, (unless it's a completionist LTC) or to an ironman player. But you can compare the ironman players amongst themselves and discuss why/where certain units may be better. If this wasn't the case, discourse would never exist, which is one of the most powerful things that I think exist and SHOULD BE PUSHED, not shunned, for the FE community.
I do think each category has their own definition of what they define as efficient, and as you said in the video, doesn't necessarily apply to all. But having a defined set of rules for a sub category or a "reasoning" behind their thinking isn't necessarily a bad thing when trying to voice your opinion. For those being aggressive and mean or downright unwilling to listen to others or allow that discourse, there's no space for that IMO, but I do believe that being a firm believer in your decisions is nothing to be ashamed of, or to avoid saying.
Your community representation research is fantastic and I think more of that should be done honestly!
This part was very interesting to see. But I want to point at that, I'm not an LTC player. Even though I'm not, I can acknowledge that, ON AVERAGE, the LTC player will probably be a more knowledgeable player than if you don't LTC. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that other people are just better than you at something. I probably couldn't come up with some of the strats the LTCer's can. But it does ultimately come down to what enjoyment do you derive. If we only did things to be "the best" or "optimal" then only a few people would ever find satisfaction. So the statement "play how you like" is not quite a diss or disrespect, but is an actual, "derive enjoyment from what you want to do, but don't disregards actual information being presented (don't blindly accept it either)."
The "efficiency" being a mindset is pretty much true.. and again. Nothing wrong with that. But there are general trends to what people deem efficient and not, so maybe defining that amongst each game or before a discussion will greatly help the discourse.
Saying things like : "I used this unit against all odds and still succeeded" is not as much of a victory as you think it is. It's kind of a participation trophy award to be given a victory DESPITE using something deemed bad, not because of it. So no, I will disagree, i don't think we should encourage "using Anna as a true solo" ,unless you're into that kind of that, if your trying to justify a good unit. It's not even that I'm invalidating their experience. It is impressive to complete it, it's a monumental task. Does this make Anna good? No. So the statement of "It was a meme build" is an accurate one, and doesn't downplay the individual, but instead acknowledges the truth of what's being said.
You're also kinda cherry picking what responses and what answers given on reddit (of all places) really define a discussion about a unit/class. There are plenty of reasonings as to why Donald can be considered bad or good. I'm not gonna sit here and enumerate them, but some people do fantastic jobs at explaining why they believe so and there are a ton of good discussion threads on it. Again, this is hearsay and I'm contributing to the issue ironically, but not every opinion read on the internet should be taken as absolute (including this one).
But I think I see an issue with your complaints: People assume something before they're given all the information to make a conclusion.
So... that's life unfortunately. If YOU don't set the standards as to what you want to have discussed or how you want this subject to be approached, people will jump with their conclusions and what they believe the metric is. Posting : Ivy's best class is Lindwurm, when all you said was: I really like Ivy in mage knight, isnt' an affront to your person, it's just a statement made by that individual. It doesn't invalidate your point, it's them setting a discourse for why THEY believe it is. If they do try to invalidate their point, the problem is that they suck and can't express their thoughts without undermining you, not that it's not a point worth expressing.
Ultimately this is a fantastic video, Congratulations for all the hard work you put in. This is a massive undertaking and you should be proud.
I know I sound harsh in the comments before but it's more me writing contemporaneously as I was watching. I do agree a lot of it is miscommunication and not setting clearly defined goals on what "the poster" believes is efficient. I do think the responsibility lies with the original poster though, and it's their job to define what they believe is or isn't efficient and some think skin needs to be grown for certain responses. People will disagree even if they're wrong and there are instances of things just being factually wrong in Fire Emblem... and that's ok. It doesn't invalidate their experience, but it does promote good growth and discussion within the community (as long as it's inclusive).
""I used this unit against all odds and still succeeded" is not as much of a victory as you think it is. It's kind of a participation trophy award..."
Could you expand on that a little bit? When I played Engage I did a specific run that ignored a lot of stuff, and I thought the process itself was very fulfilling for me personally, and I thought it was a very good accomplishment in my eyes.
I'm not taking insult at what you said, but I am open to hearing more what you mean about what you said. I'm just not sure if using "participation trophy" is right in this case.
You mentioned setting the standard of how you want to be approached so I'll take initiative and mention what was part of the aforementioned Engage run:
Maddening, used no one past Ch. 9 (Mauvier/Veyle excluded,) no Seadall, no inheriting Canter, and sticking to promotions that "made sense" according to proficiencies (only exception I remember was making Boucheron and Etie Warriors.)
So, what I mean by this is:
Let's take Anna as an example.
She requires a TON of investment to work. She's in the wrong class for starters, she's behind in level for every character you've had up to this point. Get's doubled by pretty much everything existent and doesn't kill anything without setup as well. (This is assuming Maddening, which I should specify). To get her out of this rut, you have to basically cater your play style to:
Secure her kills, protect her, confer resources in the terms of an emblem ring (most likely micaiah so she can get faster level ups), a master seal and a second seal, all of which are highly coveted and aren't as abundant in that part of the game, for a unit that will hit benchmarks, that can be hit by other units with much less investment (as an example Chloe).
To say that Anna is fantastic and that your experience in using her should be validated and you're a great player for it.. is a "participation trophy award". You succeeded DESPITE of Anna, not because of her. There's value in achieving that, but not "Anna is a great unit". What you effectively proved was: I'm good enough to succeed even with this difficulty added on (which is fine and totally cool, just not the praise that one was expecting to receive).
Like I said, the reward received is usually misinterpreted. You wanna validate Anna, but what you're really doing is proving how much it took to get Anna to get there and why she's considered "not good" due to utilizing resources that otherwise could've been added to units that can perform that function with less investment.
I want to clarify. THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE A BAD PLAYER. It's clear you know how to play the game by using Anna. But when people put the blinders on and just ignore the difficulties with using Anna or the comparison to other similar units, you're not encouraging a valid discourse, you're just catering to what you want to hear.
But again, your run that ignored a lot of stuff and was fulfilling to you personally is totally cool and valid. I can, and never will, take away from that experience or diminish it because it's a very valid one and you should be proud in having to do it. What I do want people to notice is: even though you completed it, can you look back and see that maybe it could've been done a different way? Or altering some portions would've made some parts easier for another player? And so on so fourth. We have to be open to being wrong or understanding the limitations in our accomplishments as well. There's nothing wrong with that and it also promotes growth.
@@HolyAarom
Thank you so much! I appreciate your responses to specific parts of my analysis. While I spend basically two weeks straight working on it, there's a lot to cover, and even more time would have been needed to completely straighten out any faulty arguments and make my main points read more clearly.
I suppose one of my main issues is that terms like "good" or "bad" lose a lot of their meaning when used out of context. In an LTC or Reliable LTC, there are units that don't contribute anything to the fastest clear. In that case, I suppose "bad" means "doesn't contribute to the fastest clear under a certain metric". When making comparisons as to which unit is the most resource efficient, "bad" means the least resource efficient. When comparing Speed Growths, "bad" means a statistically lower growth rates. If there's nothing to measure though, then what does "good" or "bad" even mean? To some players, it could be a matter of their performance assuming that they get trained, and there are many goals that can still be achieved while giving these units a training arc, if desired. If someone wants to point out the shortcomings of a strategy or unit, then I just don't think a "good" or "bad" cuts it, and they should directly refer to a unit as "resource inefficient" or "doesn't have strong contributions to playthroughs attempting to be the fastest".
In not specifying the context, certain players look foolish by saying "Anna is good" when the assumption is that good means "resource efficient" (or some combination of various contexts). I agree that there's room to "call a spade a spade" and have discussions that come to definitive conclusions without anyone getting hurt in the process. I think the hurt more so comes from players having their contributions to a discussion disregarded because what they were assuming to mean "good", "optimal", etc. doesn't match the majority interpretation for the term. This is why I say "both sides are equally wrong", because (sometimes) neither made their context clear. However, each side certainly has room to be "right" under their own context, if they provide accurate arguments. Players under a Reliable LTC usually do have good reasoning to demonstrate their points, I would just recommend that such players use more accurate wording to convey their conclusions.
And yeah, as you mentioned, I believe players typically assume their conception of efficiency as the context for "good" or "bad". I don't wish to say these can't be contexts for discussions. Rather, by more clearly expressing a certain context, in addition to using a strict metric for success, discussions should be able to avoid miscommunications while still being making accurate comparisons (within their context). This is "exclusive" in restricting which players can take part in comparative discussions, but this is why I recommended opening up more formats for discussion that go beyond classic tier lists and comparisons about the "best" options. My unit performance chart is just one really, really rough idea, and I think there's a lot of room for new formats to develop. The issue is getting players on board with moving away from tier lists, etc. if they don't wish to have strict contexts. I can try to lead by example, but I think it'll have to be more than just me making a unit performance chart video or two to make it so that players "excluded" from comparative discussions have an alternatives avenue to channel their thoughts and ideas through.
Hopefully that clarifies some of my thoughts. If you still disagree, that's fine! I just wanted to make sure that my arguments were clear.
@@queenlyarts totally in the clear and thanks for responding!!! Moving forward I’ll also Try to adhere (if I’m discussing units, not just as a quick comment) to your chart idea. I think more context is always fantastic for these types of showcases!!!
Nino is not the best example to illustrate the problem in the discourse. As you laid out, it is very hard to come up with a context in which Nino is not at least outclassed by other mages.
My personal favorite examples of units that are valued very differently by players are the early game pegasus knight in the GBA games; Shanna in FE6, Florina in FE7 and Vanessa in FE8. From a efficiency perspective, those three are all S-tier units. They bring something to the table that no other unit you can get at that point provides, flyer utility. In the context of LTC, it is also optimal to rig their levels so they get needed stat gains, which turns them into flying Juggernauts very early and reliably. But once you lower the efficiency requirement, those units all become much worse. If you don't intend to skip parts of the map, flying utility becomes less necessary. Playing the map more slowly also means that you'll do more combat, and all three of the pegasus knights are pretty bad at combat when they join. HHM Florina without Lyn mode transfers is the worst of them, as she doesn't even double many enemies at base and deals pathetic damage. A "casual" player, who isn't going to just carry Seth/Marcus and the lord to the throne to kill the boss and seize, will look at a tier list that lists the pegasus knights as top tier, and will be very disappointed by their performance. Telling such a player that they "aren't playing the right way" is not a productive argument.
That's me at 12:10. I've come to realize that tier lists are a waste of time and nothing more than mental masturbation for people who have too much time on their hands. The notion of efficiency is a waste of people's time as well.
Where can i find that post with the detailed write up of all the units? I actually would like to read that. If they put that much effort into thier post then they have to have paid the game extensively.
Looking back, I realize I actually had saved two separate Engage tier lists with thorough write ups, and the one I included in the video is not that one made by the person who left a response indicating how they had made a well reasoned list that got a poor response. I'm incredibly sorry about this mix up.
Here's the post that you expressed an interest in reading: www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/10zrzj8/unit_tier_listguide_after_3_maddening_playthroughs/?context=3
I would also recommend taking a look at the post I intended to show. It may be a bit late to fix my mistake, but hopefully you can still take away something from it: www.reddit.com/r/FEEngage/comments/14emaxq/5_maddening_run_tier_list_no_dlc_emblems_but_dlc/?context=3
22:56 I'm surprised at how high the percentage fo no deaths and full recruitment is. Yes, being able to keep every unit you use alive and reccruit every character no matter the difficulty does demonstrate skill, at least in my opinion, but can't it also be more efficient to skip out on certain units who won't help you, or sometimes make a conscious choice to let a unit go for the sake of the longevity of your run? Knowing when to let a unit go, when to prioritize your other units and such, that seems skillful to me. I don't know, I just find it very intriguing.
This video all in all is very well put together and really gets my brain going. I hope we can spread it around the community a bit.
You are correct that sometimes recruiting a unit is more effort than the unit is mechanically worth, however your not considering the fact that most people also look at the units as characters who they like and want to get to know, its a bit hard to have to have a support conversation with a unit that you didn’t recruit or let stay die instead of reseting the map.
@@ninjakirby777 I thought we were talking strictly about efficient runs of fire emblem
If we are talking about doing just straight normal runs then I'm not surprised at all - and I fall into the same crowd, which is recruiting everyone possible and keeping everyone alive, because it makes me feel better.
Another small FETuber with interesting content? Consider me intrigued and subbed!
Hey I just wanted to stop by and say that you really had me sucked in with this video. This was fantastic, and you did a wonderful job framing the discussion both in history and how we can approach the conversations today!
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I only just found this video so I would like to take that survey again now, that sounds like a fun thing to give my takes on
Good video though!
Thank you! I closed the survey in case I ever want to look back at the results, but I created a copy for late submissions since you expressed an interest!
forms.gle/6fA7RD1gmXajpZtaA
I feel like "efficiency" nowadays boils down to which unit build can kill the hardest bosses with multiple lifebars in one turn, and not being able to figure out how to do the same on your own means you're not a skilled player, and you should restart your run because you gave the wrong skill/statbooster/reclass item to the wrong character since chapter 1.
What I see here is that Fire Emblem players here in the West (since JP players have different views, focusing mostly on beating Endgame based on their views on FE8) are applying competitive point of view to a thoroughly non-competitive game. You know, since it’s single-player.
That's my biggest issue with how "skill" has always been measured in Fire Emblem fandom. Fire Emblem as a game is designed around the assumption that the player is going in blind, completely ignorant of what is to come. You're not supposed to know how many chapters or recruitable characters there are, or when they join if they join. You're not supposed to know any character's growth rates, or stat caps, or anything "under the hood". You're not supposed to know the contents of each treasure chest or village, so that the player has to weigh if the POTENTIAL reward is worth it. You're not supposed to know when is the best chapter to save X special weapon for. It's designed around the assumption that the player will accept the consequences of their mistakes and not save scum (rewind features aside, there could be a whole 'nother rant on why I don't like them), and that the player will accept the results of RNG and adapt accordingly. Reinforcements are SUPPOSED to blindside the player and be an unexpected wrench in their perfect plan. Large cast of characters are there specifically because the player is expected to lose characters by making mistakes or having no good answer to a fight. And on and on and on.
So WHY is a style of play that assumes perfect prior knowledge of the game and removing as much RNG as possible, really just sidestepping as many "as designed" mechanics as possible, how we measure skill? It doesn't make sense. Wouldn't a better measure of real player skill be to play a version of Fire Emblem that preserves the blindness of a first playthrough by having each subsequent playthrough be a unique, generated campaign with novel maps, characters, etc.? Because you only ever REALLY play each Fire Emblem once. Once you've started a second playthrough, the player ignorance that the game relies on to really make everything work is gone.
@@7QWERTY13 Ok, you do make some good points, but I do wonder if any of that does excuse ambush spawns. Not trying to be confrontational, I am just curious.
@@azurethescaletipper210 Some implementation of reinforcements might be egregious (like when they spawn at the start of enemy phase rather than the end), but the intention behind reinforcements is good in principle: additional enemies have unexpectedly appeared, how will you adjust your strategy to deal with them?
@@7QWERTY13 Ok, just wanted to know about ambush spawns. Glad we can agree on that.
@@7QWERTY13 Yeah, like if you pressed me for a definitive way to measure 'skill' in FE it would be being able to sightread a max difficulty ironman, not who can datamine and strategize the final chapter fight before booting up the game
damn people were arguing over training nowi? 💀 awakening is so easy you can easily train her to get her child
I see quite a bit of issues, just early on talking about skill.
It takes literally zero technical skill to play fire emblem, the commands and controls are simply and easy for most to enjoy. The two reasons for that is that nothing in this game is actually focused on your players ability to actively perform an action. This is a purely strategical game, with enough random elements in it that it's a very hard to talk about it requiring what I think is the more traditional definition of "skill".
Strategies the right word to really use. Skill is to action what strategy is to thinking and decision making. But because of that kind of points out what's flawed about the idea of "time saving" in general.
It's kind of a big downside when it comes to LTC and playing very fast. It takes very little degree of knowledge about the game. For just an offshoot example, I could bring up Sacred Stones and so long as you know who the character Seth is, you can likely accomplished top-end LTC results in that early game, as well as clear chapter after chapter incredibly quickly.
But this is not to say that these are not things that stress some type of impressive strategy. But I'd say the four pillars to mastering a game of strategy are;
Simplicity; which is probably the closest to what efficiency is typically. Doing something in the most pragmatic way that is the quickest to result in the favorable outcome without any care for overall investment or growth.
Adaptability; being able to overcome different challenges that occur due to either randomness or misfortune
Security; overall and optimization towards minimizing any types of expenses or consequences, such as very safe play
Profit; the overall act of gaining more advantages do to resources being spend.
Problem is displaying a high degree of confidence with any of these is going to make things look incredibly easy. Mostly because all of these are filled by knowledge and once you have knowledge it's rather difficult to lose it.
I'm sure that some big fanboy of any form of play will try to run in then describe how their favorite way to play actually demonstrates all those but they typically don't. It's literally not possible to do things by minimum standards and focus on maximum improvement at the same time. Adaptability its self cannot be controlled.
Through an essence effectively prove oneself incredibly good with strategy, you would have to firstly be isolated from the community and not be taking advice from others, need to specifically limit yourself to typically the worst and most restrictive options possible, attempt to do everything at as quick of a pace as you could, somehow also maximize "improvement", and get incredibly unlucky at the same time.
Which my point more so with listing all that out is that it's impossible to do all those things at the same time. Several of these things are just completely out of your control, and multiple of them are genuinely at odds with one another in many different ways. And really call it your own skill it has to be something that you discover in the supposed organic way, because it's more reflective of how well your mind works then really how great you are at performing a task.
Which is why it's really dumb that people are presented some kind of standard that literally is just the way that they used to write LTC strats. People that have told you that efficiency is not tied to ltc are likely very new in the community. Efficiencies just what makes a unit good for ltc runs. Is that the reason why first flyer that you get with the best availability is probably going to be one of your primo characters for receiving stat boosts. The character can afford to be very middle ground and not very good, as simply strengthening a flyer is very useful in a playthrough that you're focusing on turn count.
But outside of that, it's just dumb to call it efficency. What makes something efficient or not is defined by the preset goal of what you're trying to achieve.
Like if you want to save turns, of course I move and being able to move through any terrain is a really good feature.
But if you're talking like doing a hardcore Ironman, survivability is going to be more valuable than time saving.
If you actually want to make the game more challenging, using the worst units with no investments does the most actually boost the difficulty without modifying the game to be any harder.
And even then the difficulty is inconsistent due to luck. Favorable outcomes can still screw you over, at no fault on the player.
The issue with Growth units and why I don't recommend to use them (at least in the mid/late game) is because they are usually a massive pain in the butt to grind, you have to baby them, to slow the pacing of your game, and give them tons of favoritism, just to make them catch up with the rest of your party.
I say it as someone who grinded Nino in my first FE7 run, it took me more than 2 hours of absolute boredome grinding her, just to turn her into something with slightly better stats than Pent, but without Staff utility.
I applaud this effort and agree with your goals. I've read the comments in the Reddit thread and the consensus seems to be "gatekeeping good actually," which is thoroughly depressing. It just seems like people feel a need for a metric like this so they can know just how superior they are to others and just who they are able to exclude from their discussions.
Gate keeping can be good. You just have to actually know what gate you are the keeper of.
@@thorscape3879 Can you provide an example? I can't think of any instance where gatekeeping is a good thing. It only benefits the gatekeepers, and not the community at large.
@@Arkholt2 I play a lot of card games and TTRPGs. Sometimes when you get a new player that are absolute dicks even on first meeting. I have done it multiple times and have will do it in the future. I've had to do it to long-standing members too.
It is correct and good to tell such people to piss off and go away ASAP both for the health of the play group and the games. This is by definition gate keeping.
Gate keeping is ethically neutral. It's applications can be morally judged though.
More generically, banning people from message boards is also gate keeping.
@@thorscape3879 I don't think that's the generally accepted definition of gatekeeping. Wanting people to not be jerks is just a normal societal expectation. Gatekeeping is when communities set up arbitrary boundaries specifically meant to keep people they deem "undesirable" from participating in said community, such as video game communities trying to keep out people who don't conform to their playstyle or perceived level of skill. Basically, people who you could easily see fitting into the group are kept out because certain people in the group want to keep it exclusive. This only benefits the people keeping them out, and not the wider community.
@@Arkholt2 What people generally accept as the term's meaning is irrelevant. To gate keep is to limit or prevent access to a thing.
By banning a person from a group, web site, or forum you have kept the gate. It is the definition of the word.
For what it's worth, I'm one of the comments at around 34:00 "downplaying my skill" and I don't feel that way at all? I just know that what's strongest and easiest to use in a given game doesn't always perfectly overlap with what I find fun. The reply to me that you highlight offers the unsolicited advice of "if you used that mechanic you don't like you could do x!" and that made me think "hmm that's kinda neat even though I'm never gonna do it," not feel invalidated in some way.
There was definitely a lot of room for misinterpretation in all my research. I suppose the point I was trying to get at is that certain classes have varying value depending on the playstyle, and that someone shouldn't feel their playstyle is less skilled because they value units differently from how the standard playstyle values them. I understand now that this is not the stance you are trying to defend, and I apologize. I really wish I could have gone in a lot more detail about my thoughts on every comment, but that obviously wouldn't be feasible, as my analysis was already long enough.
@@queenlyarts oh, I was specifically the comment about not using captured units in Fates, not the archer enjoyer. There's no need to apologize or anything, this doesn't hurt my feelings either, but the only real issue I feel my case illustrates is people maybe being a bit too overeager to share their expertise unsolicited (especially something widely known like Rallyman)?
It's funny. If you play through a Pokémon challenge hack with mons like Corsola and Vespiquen, everyone thinks you're an absolute Chad.
If you beat Theater of Blood while locking yourself in Morytania, you become the biggest 07scape channel on TH-cam.
Beat Pikmin without getting any Blues, and you're similarly an absolute unit.
But apparently, wanting to spend a slot on Amelia shows that I suck at strategy games. Never mind that I'm adding an element of short-term complexity to the game due to needing to clear the chapter while also working to feed Amelia kills, and then successfully working around it with careful planning. Never mind that some of Amelia's supports *actively encourage* the player to train her. Never mind that I *just* got done clearing Chapter 6 with Seth benched, no deaths, and all villagers saved by the Great Gilliam Airdrop (which will also be met with public outcry from Reddit, because Gilliam). I suck, apparently!
Just vouch in and say that I might be an oddball for playing Fire Emblem like how I play XCOM: I enjoy pre-combat prepping, I enjoy training my units to their fullest potential, and I enjoy thinking about how to build fun units. So this whole "just use Ryoma to clear the game" or "just solo the game with Seth" never appealed to me. First time I thought it was a joke but apparently not
Knife only runs in Resident Evil: Respectable challenge run, adds challenge and replayability to the game.
Deploying swordlocked units in Fire Emblem: "Lol this guy must be a moron."
Interestingly enough, right after I watched your video, TH-cam recommended me this:
th-cam.com/video/7-_rK0KkB6k/w-d-xo.html
I thought you made a follow-up video until I clicked on it and realized it was made by a different person in a totally different context. And yet, as I watched the video, I noticed so many parallels to the Fire Emblem community's "efficiency mindset". It felt kinda surreal and I kept wondering if this person is secretly a FE player.
I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share. 🙂
That was a fantastic video, thank you for bringing it to my attention. Their main application of the topic was to the education system, but for the most part they kept it pretty broad, and I also found myself thinking about how it can be applied to the FE community. I actually remember a comment on one of my Reddit points bringing up Goodhart's law too: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Now, their actual example involving video games at 40:30 didn't directly apply. They presented the measurement of video games being effective as being "fun", and explained how the measurement of whether someone can beat the game doesn't actually measure the original goal, but recontextualizes the conversation around how to most optimally beat the game. Most players aren't actually trying to measure the effectiveness of the games as entertainment when talking about what's most efficient or optimal. As we've seen, there are a lot of "counterarguments" centered around "play however you want, but gameplay discussions wish to go beyond analyzing what's fun". Players are stating that the goal of FE gameplay discussions is to (in my words) provide a thought experiment that lets players express and further develop their game knowledge. One common sentiment I've seen is that "tier lists are fine because even if they aren't objective, the real value is the discussion that forms around it".
So the actual critique here, and the way we would apply the takeaways from this video, is to both judge whether players have been effective in achieving the goal of gameplay discussions, and whether that even means it's "good". And yes, there have been a lot of discussions formed from tier lists and the like, but for those engaging in discussions to come to a tangible conclusion, it's ineffective- and many players have expressed determining what the "best" strategies are to be their goal/interest. For those who wish to make unit guides- are we actually coming up with effective suggestions for players who want help? We hardly know what every player needs help with, since the units you use is only a small contributor to one's ability to beat the game, and ease of use varies anyways. So perhaps unit guides are also ineffective, just resulting in discussions from experienced players arguing whether X unit would be easier for players with an indeterminably "low" amount of experience to use than Y unit.
And even if these discussions are effective in meeting their goals- are they good? Some players may enjoy the experience, but we have to consider how they facilitate a frustrating environment where players are just talking past each other. I've seen responses talking about how "players debating and not agreeing" is "good, actually", which is a sentiment I absolutely cannot get behind. Why must we be complacent in sticking with the established forms of discussion, when we could try to accomplish the same goals in a different manner? There are other ways players can have their thoughts on available strategies expanded that don't involve trying to make comparisons rooted in vague measurements. Being vague may be effective in opening up the discussion to more players, but does that make it good when we now have an even wider base of players that are being told their evaluations and contributions are wrong?
Zoe also brings up a quote at 1:00:21, stating that "just as there is no one strategy guaranteed to spark the next big idea. Until the tech industry recognizes that reality, it'll remain a work environment that's best suited for one very specific type of individual- and the products it creates will continue to primarily meet the needs of that very same group". This brings up another issue with gameplay discussions centered around efficiency- even if they're effective, they're creating an environment that only suits the needs of players who enjoy discussing efficiency. I've read many comments saying "just start your own discussion if you don't enjoy efficiency", but this doesn't address how efficiency has been set as the standard for discussions, and it's been demonstrated over the years that gameplay discussions under other contexts have faced a lot of struggle in being taken seriously, getting traction, or avoiding the issue of "backseaters" interjecting their thoughts based on efficiency.
You don't have respond to my thoughts, because like Zoe expressed, the real value of a lot of writing isn't whether others see it, but the learning process that occurred along the way. To conclude, I'll bring up one final quote, dedicated to everyone that has responded saying that the issues I'm calling out are an inherent part of online gameplay discussions and cannot be avoided, so there's no point in changing anything: "The way things are isn't the way they have to be. We can choose to say no to efficiency. We must". The context is slightly different, but the sentiment still stands.
the thing about anna is we played without dlc. everything becomes different when you are given silver weapons and the well.
i still love the shield bonded strats.
Same, Bonded Shield is such a cool take on an Enemy Phase tool. I'm doubtful it'll come back in future titles, but I hope they keep experimenting with similar mechanics going forward.
Standard tier lists should just be based on playing through the game in a way that isnt mind-numbingly slow and grindy, because in most games if you grind a ton and turtle or juggernaut every map then almost every unit will he able to be equally as good as every other unit. More importantly, tier lists need in-depth explanations to go with them, otherwise theyre useless.
MOST importantly though, the assholes in the community need to shut up sometimes. Preferably most of the time.
I've been a Fire Emblem player since 2003, and in the early 2000s I specifically shied away from online discourse surrounding the games, because it's the same kind of discourse I had no choice but to deal with in MMOs (Like FFXI and Everquest). Particularly around about 2007. When mathematics are heavily involved with gameplay, there is always a large camp that obeys the math no matter what, while also saying the math favors certain abilities over others, even if it doesn't, really. While also saying they obey the math for fun.
As far as I'm concerned, I generally tend to place great value on units who can do things no other units can do, as well as early game units that have ample time to be built. And when I say things no other unit can do, I'm not talking about ORKOing Unit Type X even if they rolled high stats at base on Map X, I'm talking like... hold this point without being threatened or kill this boss by themselves etc. Stuff that's clearcut and possibly more related to stat caps. Like how in Radiant Dawn, for instance, Boyd is the only unit capable of fighting with The Black Knight, and killing him, without being Master Crown promo'd. And I don't mean, finishing him off after a Tier 3 Haar chip. I mean, Boyd does all of the combat, and either 3HKOs BK or OHKOs him with a Bond induced Critical hit. (And perhaps the real value, isn't doubled). Or Lyn Mode Dorcas being the unit who can survive a Luna crit on the boat map in Fe7.
More tangentially, is the constant warring over waifus. As cold and logical as FE discussions can be, people will overrate their favorite waifus, often in excess, but sometimes just by 1 tier in a list. It's understandable, but hilariously always points out that people are using the math in the game to aid and abet their preferences, rather than to strike out objectively.
Quite often, no matter how well you frame your arguments, PoV, or methods, the chorus from online will say, "That frame of reference is irrelevant."
You are like a messiah to me in this community right now, and I believe I stand with a silent significant group that stands behind what you are trying to do.
A few months ago I came to the conclusion I would refuse to participate in the FE community. I will flat out say it, I don't care what any other fandom has done, I regard it as by far the most toxic jrpg fandom in existence.
While not my primary complaint, efficiency's curse was a secondary reason for me. I could go on and on on why to be honest. From the fearmongering that if you "dont include efficiency" there is no way to benefit stats like mov on tier lists (even though there are in different metrics, like how mov adds flexibility on a turn-by-turn basis for players). Or weird assuming that "no efficiency" means infinite grinding allowed?????
I could also define my standards I liked for tier lists. It is complex, but essentially I would use holding on to the many "restrictions" efficiency tier lists use, but shifting turns to being about investement in > flexibility/available non-obtuse (meaning players can figure them out without spreadsheeting) strats to help win maps out. Though I am open to other interpretations as well.
I could also say how I think people like Mekkah have done a diservice to this community by refusing to use letter tiers for his "guides" instead using "niche utility flyer on a Wednesday" tiers or whatever. In that this mentality assumes efficiency deserves a "monopoly" on the idea of unit usefulness comparisons through traditional tiering. Also implying you can't use traditional letter tiering if you don't use efficiency, and encouraging the idea that without efficiency such tiering is worthless.
Ultimately though I am just tired to be honest, and though I may be reaching, I believe I may be speaking for a very significant non-FE active portion of FE players.
Maybe if FE had a system like Valkyria Chronicles that actually gave the player bonuses for lower turns (thus making efficiency translate into making the game easier in future maps) this all would be much better.
Weirdly enough, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn gave bonus xp awards for fast map clears which makes them the only games that encourage fast map completion to any degree as far as I'm aware.
Yup I'm part of that "silent group" you're talking about. I wouldn't be surprised if the "efficiency mindset" has alienated a lot of people and caused them to leave. Nowadays I occasionally lurk on Serenes Forest, but I hardly post anymore. I don't even bother with FE on Reddit and Gamefaqs. You're right, it's too toxic, and every post I make feels like walking on eggshells.
Thanks for making this video. I've never liked tier lists and the "efficiency" mentality, and its effect on the community as a whole. But every time I tried to speak out against it, I felt alone in my struggle. It wasn't until you made this video, and I saw dozens of people also vent their frustrations, that I finally feel vindicated.
Just ironman. Don't TAS your runs unless you really want to!
Okay let me say congrats on the study.
It is very needed and much welcomed and appreciated. But at times of the video you shown concern, confusion, or dishearten about certain aspects of the community. I can understand that 'cause you are no longer touching the community-- you have stumbled unto a much larger subject beyond. What you started to encounter was that of personality types and how they affect and even effect their hobbies.
To begin, as much as this study was a joy to listen to, chances are that it is junk. Mainly because of Reddit. Reddit is trash for nearly any study about hobbies within pop culture (and I don't include that from a personal standing). Time and time again it has been proven that Reddit is full of bandwagons riders-- and the Fire Emblem community on Reddit is one of them. The reason why you got such a kickback for going out of the "considered" thought was because you were running into type B personalities. These people most likely did not play the game but only joined in a large group 'cause it was popular. I've seen it so many times; you say something that is not "considered" thought and get dog piled with no real opposing argument. That is because again these people didn't play the game; they don't know the specifics of the game to refute, so they attack.
You have to toss it out. Stick with Serenes Forest or other sites that actually have a large fan base that literally played the games.
This didn't become a problem until after the Telos games and didn't become a pandemic until Awaking made the game popular. Type B only want things in groups, while that in of itself isn't bad, when you get a bunch of them together it can easily turn into an echo chamber of group think. Which is what you were running into.
A lot of older Fire Emblem players fall into Type A [they want to experiment], thus the older days before the Telos migration, were filled with more arguments about story and character quirks/ archetypes/ roles. Not much on mechanics unless there was a question or request for advice. Before the Telos migration "efficiency" was this [and a lot of older players still believe this to still be the case]:
1). Army of taste-- Fire Emblem key focus isn't combat but characters. The creator wants you to invest with the characters, and you can't get involved with a character if you don't use them. This is why so many characters have specific skills and traits only to them; to make that character stand out and grasp your attention, so you can get to know them personally.
2). Map-- each map is a type. Some characters do good on one and abysmal on the other.
3). Safety and comfort-- if you can safely conquer your objective, then the plan worked. What is the point of doing a low turn count plan and miss the attack (because Fire Emblem is a game of chance), and half of your army get wiped? What is the point of going at a snails pace if you have a certain number of rds to get the objective done?
What ever characters to your taste, can fit the map and get the job done in a safe and comfortable manner is efficient.
I hope this helps.
So serious about Reddit. If you do this in other genres you will get the same thing and if you ask certain things about the genres, that only people who played would know,--I am not joking-- you may see results of maybe above 75% of people that have not played the genre are attacking you over.
That's a fair assessment. I'm familiar with broad community opinions from offhandedly seeing content over the years, but I haven't actively been involved in any community for all too long, so a lot of this was coming off of observations. With there being so much history look back at, it's possible I was looking in the wrong spaces. To speak to your point about Reddit, I suppose my lack of experience on the site past a few months ago led me to have more faith in the space. Also, as I stated in the survey discussion, a lot of the responses were indeed coming from Reddit, but I definitely had to just kind of hope this was representing more than just that space. In the future, I'll try to clarify questions to get a better sense of which communities are being represented, or just don't post to Reddit if you truly think that it's not worth it. I still think that as a large space with issues that actively cause contention, it's worth acknowledging them, but perhaps a different approach would be needed.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks a lot of these "efficiency elitists" don't even play the game they're arguing, and just parrot arguments.
Why are likes & dislikes disabled?
Uh oh, are they actually disabled? I generally turn likes to not be visible for my videos, and I believe dislikes have been not visible across TH-cam for a while, but if you're not even able to leave either one, I'll have to look into it.
thank you. i have the extension@@queenlyarts
I'm just here to say that I enjoy treating FE games like an excel sheet, and that's why Engage and Fates are my top dog favorite FE games.
Great video
With the characters displaying one after another, I wanna ask why so often they're little girls?
I’m of the opinion that efficiency is just an excuse for nerds online to validate themselves. FE has no leaderboards, this is a single-player jrpg that has little execution barrier or skill ceiling beyond just finishing the game. Of course some units are better than others, but especially in recent games anybody can be used so such heated discussion with using Anna in engage is just stupid.
If I had to say more I think there could be a definition based on judging units on making the game "easier" for new players (maybe or maybe not based on the investement/flexibility formula I described)
HOWEVER when I say "new players" I do not mean inexperienced. I mean people trying out a game for the first few runs and trying to beat a certain difficulty. This can range all the way from doing their first normal classic victory, to acomplishing FE12 Lunatic Reverse.
So if it is not clear, this definition of "new players" covers basically nearly the entirety of the playerbase as weird as that may sound, and so when people say "tier lists to help new players" it should NOT be interpretted as meaning just a niche thing to help your little brother play his first FE game.
I think this is a really interesting train of thought. I've been reconsidering the place "ease of use" may or may not have in various gameplay discussions, and I like this example of a specific use case that you laid out. I can't guarantee I'll make another survey/analysis on the topic, but I'll give it some serious consideration before making any other statements/videos relating to unit analysis.
So to me, LTC is a speedrun category. Playing for ltc requires rigging crits and growths, generally unreliable strategies, and glitches/skips. For an exsmple theres a 2 turn ltc for 3-9 of RD thst involves rigging a meteor crit and possibly a promotion of calill for a mastery skill proc
Efficiency as a style is not very friendly to certain unit types such as armors, archers and the est archetype which makes some people very angry
I dont really engage with tier lists outside of radiant dawn in which i like to go in to argue against jill and sothe and also for ilyana>soren.
I royally hate the "Efficiency" talk in Fire Emblem and have felt alienated by the wider community for years because I don't find that discussion engaging. Warp Skipping defeats the entire point of the game IMO, and the route to achieving "Efficient" play is just boring to me. A run where all you have is 1 class because "It'S tHe BeSt" and not in the context of some challenge run is just boring and samey to me, there's no strategy to it, just spam Wyvern Lords or Paladins to the boss, and give yourself a gold star. You might as well be playing with godmode on, and it's frustrating when I try and share or contribute and get completely shut down for not having that same viewpoint as, supposedly, everyone else that LTC is the way to go, if you're not playing efficiently you're playing it wrong, ETC. I bet Fire Emblem would have a much wider audience if this kind of fan discussion stopped, because it's made me not want to keep playing despite being a long time superfan of the series...
Personally, I like "Juggernaughting", I like getting every Gaiden Chapter, I like recruiting every unit and keeping everyone possible alive through the end (even though Permadeath hasn't been something the series has been designed for since like, FE6/7, Classic Mode is the objectively worse way to play modern Fire Emblem), and complete every side objective and get every hidden item/reward (To clarify, such as the rewards for saving all Green units), and get the best/true/most complete ending (for games that have it, looking at you FE6). I absolutely loved sending my Assassin Colm out in the Tower of Valni and Lagdou Ruins in FE8 and letting him one-man-army his way through the mobs and clear the dungeons, eventually unlocking freaking LYON which was just so cool to have and use and I wish I'd still had anything to DO in the game once I got him! I liked reclassing my units incessantly and figuring out how to get Galeforce AND Armsthrift on my whole main squad in Awakening, or make the best possible units I could in Fates. I love taking an Est archetype unit (the "Villager" type) and babying them until they've capped out every stat and have become and absolute god unit. then doing as best I can to do the same thing for the rest of my main squad (Sorry Bench, FE games have WAY to big a cast for me to do that for EVERYONE). I like playing with my favourites, damn if they're good or not because I like the CHARACTER. I recently replayed FE6 and I absolutely LOVED Echidna. She was absolute trash compared to the rest of my squad because she joined at a pretty high level and got screwed by some of her levelups that I couldn't take the time to fix like I did with some other units. (Sonia and Fir ended up nearly capped in every stat by comparison, and Roy was able to one-round solo Idunn by comparison) I felt bad benching Wendy to bring her... I didn't even use some of the units I'd planned to initially because playing through made me love some of them that I hadn't expected to when I started. Or didn't know existed.
If I'd posted about that experience on the Fire Emblem subreddit, I'd be downvoted to hell and laughed at for even THINKING to use Fir and Wendy, putting any effort into training up Roy and Sonia, and possibly even using Echidna and Geese. I'd be ridiculed and ostracized and insulted. That's not a good reaction from the community towards someone just wanting to have fun with the game we all presumably like, and that's extremely depressing. All because the community has this unhealthy obsession with "Efficiency"
The FE subreddit is genuinely insane, I've never seen such a contrarian bizarro world. I think they would unironically enjoy Fire Emblem more if it was like that romhack that turns all the characters into generics.
@dyrr836 I mean, I've seen this kind of mentality bleed into discussion on other platforms, not just the FE subreddit. Just Reddit is really good at being a hub for niche interests and talking in that manner.
But even here on TH-cam, most Fire Emblem TH-camrs tout the LTC playstyle, talk about units in terms of efficiency, call units bad just because they have less move, etc. It’s a pervasive mindset and thinking, and it makes me not want to engage with like, the Romhack scene because I'm expecting that that kind of approach is going to just be further encouraged, and punish me for wanting to play any other way, because that's the narrative that's being fronted. Hell, I've even played full release games clearly inspired by FE that have these mindsets at their core, and ended up being really unfun for the trouble.
A game being inspired by one of my fav franchises SHOULD NOT BE A RED FLAG. But it is b3cause of this damn community and efficiency first LTC mindset. I absolutely despise it.
@@Kilo6Charlie I've never played a single FE romhack because most of them seem to be made for niche players only. The exception being Project Ember which seems to be made with normal players in mind.
Dislikes are hidden by default on youtube and this dude still disabled them that alone tells me I should not listen to him at all.
I have some issues with fe that I'm just gonna vent because I feel like it, so I find it really dumb how permadeath is always justified under the banner of personal experience yet some personal experiences aren't really seen as valid, like permadeath is a mechanic that is good because it gives people unique experiences yet when someone wants their experience to be on casual mode or using meme builds it is seen as less valid because it's not the true experience(wich is kinda stupid anyways, like challenge runs also aren't the true experience yet everyone loves those for the most part), there also just generally seems to be some riggedness like I saw one person arguing that cindered shadows edelgard is better off as a warrior because generals have a bad reputation even though with the exception of the move heavy maps warrior doesn't do a lot for her or someone dismissing gregory for his low speed completely ignoring things like his inherent staves and high magic stat or generally people dismissing someone reclassing someone out of their best class, or even people defending bullshit like fog of war, ambush spawns and 1% crits as stuff you just had to deal with back in the day rather then just stupid shit like it actually is, now for me personally I originally did feel a bit under pressure like I had to justify the way I play the game, now I think that's stupid it's my copy of the game and I get to play it however I like even if it isn't the correct way
*sigh* Videos like this remind me of way I have come to dislike the FE community in recent years. The problem was never the convention of efficiency; it was an intentionally vague convention those of us who liked to discuss units agreed upon because it differentiated units more effectively than any other set of assumptions. It took many years and new ideas to come into its own. If anything, the current meta is way less strict than it used to be since, for example, ideas like "it can often be beneficial to promote before lv. 20" became more widespread.
No, the problem came when less-veteran players or community members became influenced by those who came before them and took the conventions out of context in order to justify some weird sense of superiority above even newer players. Just like in other genres and series, the meta and tier lists were never meant for new players to adhere to. The purpose was to merely for veterans to compare and contrast units and for new players to simply take ideas from *if they wanted to*. They were never a guideline for how to play. Veterans are not immune from using characters they simply like, using characters that would give them a challenge, or using "meme builds". In fact, it was this experimentation by the community that the current meta was built on the back of. Telling me that my last FE7 playthrough where I killed the fire dragon with Kent was "inefficient" will only get a response of "I know and it's awesome".
Then again, players that feel as if tier lists or conventions that have evolved over the past 20+ years need to care about their own personal playstyles are infinitely more annoying. The "golden runs" that these tier lists imply almost never happen in reality outside of maybe some challenge runs. How I actually play isn't defined by the meta any more than any other player's is. I'm not going to tell someone how to play, but I'm also not going to care about someone who thinks their preferences should be validated over the contributions of thousands of players since FE7 was released. I also will never tell someone how to play or expect someone to play according to the meta, so I really don't get where this entitlement comes from.