Phew, I’m finally done with the game. I’ll cover the remaining stages and then put my overall thoughts at the end.

Stage 19

This stage is where the inability to reorder your forces starts to become annoying. In this stage it makes sense because it’s supposed to be a surprise attack, leaving your forces separated into two. Beating this stage has an easy and hard mode. Easy mode is to only send out your highest movement units, completely ignore the civilians, and focus just on escaping everyone. This is what I did; I also warped Sleuf down to recruit Amalda; she can then pick him up and get away while the units fight each other.

The hard mode is if you want to save the civilians to get the Knight Proof item. You want to use Rescue to help the civilians but this leaves you open to attacks from the high movement range units. But I didn’t even try.

Stage 20

On the whole I was using more and more save states as I progressed. This is the only stage, though, where I really feel like I abused save states to the point where I was using “strategies” that wouldn’t have worked at all without them. But I also think this is a stage where the inability to reorder your forces and the need for lots of door keys make the stage much more annoying than it would otherwise be.

This is a defend map, although the actual criteria is to survive 15 turns and defeat the boss (who will remain stationary until turn 15). The major annoyance of the stage is that your forces start out scattered all over the map, most of them behind locked doors (why do we need door keys to unlock the doors in Leif’s own palace??) If you haven’t bought a lot of door keys in preparation for this map, that means that many of your units will be trapped until the enemies break down the walls.

At first I tried playing it as actual defense, attempting to move my units near Lief’s place on the throne. But I couldn’t get this to work, so instead I sent out only powerful attacking units and went entirely on offense. This produced much better results, especially if you can defeat the boss before turn 15 (which ends the reinforcements). I was not able to beat it legitimately with this strategy because I couldn’t survive the ballista attacks and still beat the boss, I kept reloading states trying to figure out how I could position people to do it and one time I happened to get a super lucky situation where the right people got criticals, double moves, and dodges — as I said above, I think this is the only place where my abuse of the save states resulted in a stage win with an “illegitimate” strategy. But I was close to giving up on the game entirely at this point so I was willing to move on.

Stages 21-22

I “warp skipped” these two stages. What this means is that you use the warp staff to send someone (like Asbel) right next to the boss, and kill the boss. Then have Lara dance to give the staff user another turn, and warp Lief there to end the stage. On Stage 21 I did this the first turn, on 22 I waited until the second turn so that Karin could grab a warp staff from a village.

It’s one of the odd quirks of this game that you have these expansive, intricately designed stages like 21 and 22 but then you can beat then in a few minutes with warp staffs.

Stage 23

At the beginning of this stage I silenced the two mages, moved Saias down towards the children, and then picked him up with a flying unit so that Lief could talk to him for the Bragi’s Blade.

After a couple of failures I found that the best way to deal with the initial units and reinforcements was to head down to the bottom of the map, that way I could intercept the silenced units as they fled. I let the horsemen carry the children away to help remove some of them from the map.

Once that was done, I had a hard time with approaching the castle because I could not survive a single turn against the dragonriders that come towards you. Eventually the way I beat it was to carry Lief and Lara up near the castle and release them. On the enemy turn, Sety appears to kill the boss, and the dragon riders start moving (but don’t reach anyone). Then Lief talks to Sety, Sety moves out of the way, and Lara dances to give Leif another turn to capture the castle. I also made sure to steal all of Saias’ equipment.

Stage 24

Despite that image I didn’t actually beat the stage with a warp.

I think this is the stage that suffers the most from the inability to reorganize your squads because you have three separate groups that essentially have three different goals and need different abilities…but you have no control over who is in which group.

I completely ignored the children because there was no way I was going to even try 24 gaiden. So basically I just silenced/slept as many mages as I could, set up the right people in a way so that they could survive the stage, and then sent everyone else up. The “big shield” ability on the boss is more bullshit that can end your run due to luck, but beside that it’s not too bad. I was able to convince Galzas because I got Mareeta in my middle group.

Stage 25 (Final)

This is another stage where a lack of door keys is problematic, and where your group is separated into 6 sets. For a little bit I thought I might have to actually hack in door keys, but I was able to beat it with a combination of the Unlock staff (2 uses), the one door key I had, a lockpick thief, and warp staffs. Since it was the last stage it didn’t matter if people died, which made things a bit easier. The main thing you have to do is get rid of the Berserk staff user on the first turn. Beyond that once you get into the rooms (which give substantial magic bonuses) you can put some of the other bosses to sleep, which makes things easier.

Once I had all six places under control and the final door opened, it did take me a few tries to beat the boss. What ultimately worked was just to warp Lief into the chamber, beat the boss, and then survive one turn to capture the throne. It looks like I warped Sety in there as well.

My final rating was predictable:

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So as you may be able to tell from my posts, I did not like this game. It was definitely my least favorite of the Fire Emblems — the difficulty is just too punishing and relentless for me to truly have fun with it, even with the save state use.

However, I can appreciate the amount of time and care that went into the map design. With the possible exception of stage 1, every map is designed around a series of specific challenges that involve memorable and unique enemy arrangements and groups. There’s no “go to” strategy that you can just pull out to lazily beat any stage. Even as of 1999 there is basically no other designer that is putting this much thought into their map design. For a certain type of gamer I think this is a well designed game — I’m just not that gamer.

However, there are three elements of the game that I think are genuinely bad design and not just “it wasn’t for me”:

• As I mentioned before, the inability to rearrange your characters on the map mixes very poorly with the stages where you really need specific people (or types of people) in certain locations.
• Door keys are far too important in the game given that you have no way of knowing how many you will need, and there is no way to buy them between stages. Having some enemies that you can steal or capture keys from doesn’t really address this.
• The “big shield” ability that randomly nullifies damage is an anti-strategy luck-based element that (once again) mixes poorly with bosses that can often kill you in one round (if all their abilities proc or if they have good equipment).

This is Kaga Shozo’s final fire emblem game — we’ll see him next in Tearring Saga which is so close to FE that the company got sued by Nintendo. Meanwhile, Fire Emblem will continue on without Kaga, starting with the GBA series of games in 2002.