I’m continuing to crawl my way through FE5. The game’s difficulty is frustrating to the point where I can’t play the game for very long in one sitting before I get tired of yet another reload, and I have to put the game aside for a while. If I had to rank this game purely in terms of the fun I am having with it, it would be last place among the 5 Fire Emblems I have played so far — the punishing difficulty and permadeath is just too much. But I can respect the game design and I would like to finish it if I can. It might take a while.

Stage 9

I had a really difficult time with this stage. You need to protect the house in the upper left. The biggest danger are 5 dragon knights that have huge range and they all have Kill lances, plus one is boss-class. Once you enter any of their ranges, they will attack any units that are in range, and if there’s nobody in range they will head for the house. You start with 4 new units up near the house, and the bow knight in particular is worth saving because there’s a special dialogue that gives you an Elite sword.

There are several strategies that apparently work, but after many failures and resets, and trying various methods, I eventually won by initially feinting towards the south and drawing off four of the dragon knights, beating the boss with Asbel. I retreated the 3 regular units from the map and left only Sephira (the bow knight) on the house. I then headed through the top path. I don’t completely remember how I dealt with the 5th dragon knight (who heads towards the house) but my units were able to reach the left part early enough that Selphira didn’t get overwhelmed. I then tried to capture some of the laggard units at the bottom right but after having to reload I just got tired of the stage and finished it without doing that.

Stage 10

This stage has the first “long archers” (ballista). You can play the stage safely by taking a long time to exhaust their arrows before moving everyone into their range — this is what I did, although it loses you some useful items that you can get by playing more quickly. I probably should have at least tried to save the towns but I was so mentally defeated after stage 9 that I just wanted to get through this one with minimal resets. If you play it safe there’s really not much to fear in the stage except for the dragon knight you can see at the top of the picture, who I beat with Asbel. Karin went in to capture the bishop next to him for some useful items.

Stage 11

This stage is where the game finally defeated me and I had to raise the white flag — I did two things that violated my FE rules. The first one is that I used a cheat code to give myself a thieves’ key. I was almost entirely out of keys of all kinds, but the main reason for this was my misunderstanding of the capture rules; I lost all my thieves’ keys to capture baiting and had been relying on treasure and door keys up to now. I could see this was going to get more and more annoying so I hacked in one thieves’ key.

The second thing I did was I made two save states on the stage instead of one. I had gotten to the point where I was close to giving up on the game entirely, and so I accepted the lower difficulty rather than do that. Since then I have not made more than two save states on a stage.

The main issue with this stage is that when Lief reaches the center area, those two ballistae appear and a bunch of locked doors appear too. If you want to unlock the Gaiden chapter you have to keep Fred (the green horseman) alive and beat the stage in under 20 turns.

I spent an enormous amount of resets and reloads trying to get everything to work out, and I was never able to. In the end, I left most of my forces outside at the bottom and only took 5-6 up through the center. I accepted Fred’s death. Even after you get past that the stage is not a cakewalk, but the boss runs after you fight him once — for some reason he doesn’t use his spell so if you just range attack him it’s OK.

Stage 12

I believe this is the first fog of war stage that is not a Gaiden chapter. This one is comparatively easy; I had to restart because I moved Marth like that picture above, and then I couldn’t finish the stage in the 20 turns necessary to unlock the Gaiden chapter. I still had to reload about 5 times but given my experiences in the rest of the game, 5 reloads is a cakewalk.

Stage 12x

There is a lot to do on this stage, in theory. A perfect run of the stage would accomplish these things:

1. Recruit Troude
2. Recruit Tina
3. Recruit Perne
4. Do not let Tina use her Thief staff (requires everyone who has stealable stuff to have at least 3 magic)
5. Get the Knight Proof and Warp Staff from the dancers that show up on turn 25-30
6. Promote Lara to Dancer
7. Get all the treasures

I was able to do 2, 3, 5, and 6. It was too much trouble to recruit Troude. As far as getting all the treasures, you either have to use Warp staffs, or you can lure all the thieves down to the bottom. However, they tend to have fairly high Build making it hard to capture them, and their Speed is also high making it hard to steal from them. So I just let the treasures go and was contented with accomplishing the other stuff.

Stage 13

This map begins with Glade by himself on the castle there. While he can hold out pretty well against the enemies, I do not think that he can survive by himself if you go very slowly (once the boss reaches him, he has a lot of trouble). So we have to go fast. There are ballista and Horse Archer reinforcements which makes it especially hard to take along weak units. Discord advised me to have a Reblow staff user, although on my winning run I didn’t actually need to use it.

Once the main force arrives, some of the units will go for us. I beat the boss (Rist) easily with Armor Killer, but that’s only the first issue. Now all the initial units retreat and the ballista stop firing, but endless reinforcements come out from the top.

After a bunch of failures I got the tip from Discord that seems obvious now — to block off the sides so that the enemies can’t flood the castle area. Doing this let me finish the stage fairly easily. I didn’t bother with any of the stuff at the bottom.

I’m past the halfway point of the game, and I hope it doesn’t take another 3 weeks to finish it.