I’m back from a 2 week vacation — I finished Xenoblade Chronicles DE, and played some Sigma Harmonics (DS) which I will cover after FE5. But this is going slow.

Stage 5

The stage begins with Eyvel and Nanna stuck in the middle area. Nanna can heal but is mostly useless for fighting (her Earth Sword is decent but she dies too easily). Eyvel is awesome of course but she can’t stand up to all the enemies on her own; more and more difficult ones come out. However, when you open the door, a story event happens and Eyvel leaves. I had a hard time getting past this part because of all the mages coming down (as you can see above) and the tough enemies from the arena area are still there.

A mage with meteor at the left is a danger but I just had him waste his spells on Arbel. There is an area at the left with two strong mages guarding some chests.

I did not want to risk the stage at this point and have to go back to my save state, and the chests didn’t seem worth it. I was told that the Jormungards that the mages have cannot be used by any of my characters for quite a while so stealing those isn’t too important either.

Stage 6

This is yet another escape map. The enemies are very strong and so the dialogue encourages you to use Karin to carry people over the wall. At first I took this too seriously and tried to do it for everyone, but the enemies start moving towards you so you can’t really “stealth” the map like that. I carried a few slow people over but mostly went through the doors. Also there are 6 houses with items and such. Four of them can be picked up as you move through the town, for the other 2 I took Karin over there as everyone else was escaping. I had a close call but was able to escape.

Stage 7

I had a lot of trouble with this stage and eventually had to ask the discord for help — I think this stage is kind of unfair with a hidden gimmick. At the start, there are two ways to go down to the bottom of the stage. One has axe bandits and the other swordsmen. At first I decided I would turtle in the houses, but this does not work because on turn 2 reinforcements start coming in, and they are difficult.

There are two keys to surviving this stage: One is that the bandits can be ignored; they will not move unless you go attack them. Second is that once anyone reaches the castle and escapes, the horsemen reinforcements will all begin to retreat. I feel like this is something that would be hard to figure out on your own, unless the dialogue in the stage gives you a clue to do that.

So I sent Karin down to escape, but even then it was hard to survive the few turns it took her to get there. Meanwhile, there is also a swordsman that can be recruited by Sefy — I got the advice on discord to capture bait him and then as long as you block the way north he will try to escape the stage by going south instead, which will put him near Sefy.

There is a coliseum at the bottom but I’m not that stupid.

Stage 8

FINALLY we can use the between battle menu to arrange items and such. This is also where the “fatigue” system is implemented, so some of my characters could not be sent out. But on the whole this is a much easier stage than the previous ones.

My main difficulty was that I kept killing Marty, but I didn’t realize that Ostin has the “wrath” ability which makes him critical on counterattacks. Oops.

Stage 8 Gaiden

This was a frustrating stage for me. You begin with Tanya and Dagda alone vs. a bunch of enemies; fortunately they are pretty strong so it’s not as bad as you would think. Meanwhile everyone else went up the left side. I kept having to reset or load state because of bad moves, and then eventually when I reached the boss I could not hurt him effectively with anyone I had. So I had to restart the stage all the way from the beginning — unfortunately Asbel was fatigued so I couldn’t send him out, but the Fire Sword was in the convoy so I was able to use that along with Lief’s Light Sword to finish off the boss.

There is a mysterious thief in this stage who immediately heads for the exit and basically can’t be dealt with — I wonder if the only purpose of that unit is to open the door to the boss so that you can finish the stage even if you have no keys (which I am very very short on, I have no thief keys left since I lost one to capture baiting).

I’ve started promoting units as well, which is nice.