Engage Maddening has some of my favorite gameplay in the series (along with CQ and FE12 Lunatic modes) but unlike those games I've never actually played Engage on lower difficulties, so when you showed the "retry map but retain EXP" feature that Hard mode has you should have seen the double take I did. I knew from some of the takes I see online that Hard mode had to be a totally different world than Maddening, but that's just a genuinely unhinged feature to have in a strategy game lmao.
Great discussion man! Yeah a lot of the “meta” is strange especially between the FeTuber sphere since a lot of them haven’t actually completed the game on maddening. I don’t think it actually outpaces 3H or Awakening in terms so disparity between hard and maddening, but it’s definitely noticeable enough that you’re almost playing a different game.
Welcome to the fire emblem fanbase where if you havent beaten thracia 776 with one hand tied behind your back and your eyes closed then you're a worthless filthy casual
Anybody who plays hard is a casual who can't even play the game. Anyone who plays on less than Super Ultra Mega Death Lunacy Masochism Mode is a scrub who needs to nut up and play a REAL Fire Emblem game with a REAL difficulty, like Sacred Stones. /s love the vids
What I super appreciate about Maddening is that the stat inflation takes its sweet time. Lots of games in the series with hard modes have the stat inflation be absurd right out the gate and it makes the early maps incredibly repetitive and frustrating because you'll basically have the same tools to deal with them on every run. The game doesn't start getting truly terrifying until you've had a chance to start making your resources unique to your run.
I just love the unique component that dodge-tanks / defense tanks can become light runes on maddening. I also like drawing the attention of backup enemies because they’ll only be hit by the backups and not the primary attacker.
Theres a reason its called Maddening, its because I would go insane if I had to play it. Seriously I already found Hard mode to be ball-bustingly difficult compared to what i was used to I legit didnt know about the retain EXP thing though, Im not gonna lie I LOVE that as an optional feature for players who are having a tough time with ANY difficulty.
I only ever played on maddening. When I lost a couple ironmans I wanted to bump down the difficulty but the fact that the entire game is trivialized by funny foggy yunaka just made it pointless to even try. On a different note please allow me to dump my arguments for why yunaka is still amazing on maddening: -Great stats as an early prepromote not requiring a master seal -Only unit with knife access (unless you wanted to reclass someone to thief in the early game for some reason) with knifes having powerful and cheap forges -Not being targeted in terrain allows to run in and kill/poison stuff and be safe on enemy phase potentially killing/poisoning them on subsequent turns as they run past -She can pull emblem enemies while not getting finished off by the other enemeies due to them having 0 hit (terrain required). -Starting out with the miccy ring on a chapter with high amounts of blue tiles firing 3 great sacs for massive exp/sp gain which coupled with her dagger forges and high stats (helps her kill even more enemies for even more exp/sp) gives her access to many great skills before you lose the rings -Her competition in the early game is rather few. Everyone besides Chloe and maybe Louis either sucks or is average so she is a safe deploy for when things get dicey and you need a reliable juggernaut (early-mid game) Aside from dagger forges she doesen't need any investment to make early game trivial and holds up later due to skills. She is just loaded with convenient advantages that snowball to make her hold up.
As someone who also used Yunaka on Maddening to great effect, let me continue. Yunaka is very notable as being an early game juggernaut, but she does fall off……… right as you get Corrin. Corrin with Yunaka is suuuuuuuuper good. Chain attacks are no longer a problem, you have portable Avo terrain, and she can lean into a support role really well with Corrin Engage. And yes, Yunaka Avo Enemy phasing DOES work on Maddening. You just need to specifically rig the Avo so that the enemies have single digit hit rates. Maddening AI will only pass you if they have ZERO hit, 1% hit is fine for them. And even with the “invisibility,” Yunaka can still use that to her advantage to make/hold chokes, provide allies with Fog terrain completely safely, or just take free pot shots. So yeah, Yunaka is still an amazing unit on Maddening. But if you want to trivialize Maddening, Panette is where it’s at. 100% crit vantage with Ike does brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I've never actually played engage on hard because i liked playing 3h on maddening so i wanted to see if i could do it and i thought it was really good, probably the most fun I've had with a fire emblem game. By the end merrin and panette were the only units that could actually kill anything and lapis (Erika) when engaged could one shot. My alear was a funny story because i found him to be dead weight all game so just used him as a corrin bot but decide to use roy on him and he all of a sudden became one of my best units. It was a fun first experience, later playthroughs i have more units that can actually kill because i know how to build units now
It’s weird because Maddening has a lower barrier to entry than previous Lunatic modes, in my experience. But anecdotally I guess it scales with so much more challenge. I only did Conquest Hard, but I would say that Engage Maddening is only a little more difficult than that. Or maybe I’ve just gotten better at the games over the years and the difficulty increased even more.
When you said the stat inflation is 4 to 5 points, I was actually underwhelmed. While that's still a lot, it's nothing compared to the insanity that is Awakening Lunatic and Three Houses Maddening.
Maddening was definitely much better in this game. I had expected it to be completely terrible after 3H. I def recommend it to anyone who hasn't given it a shot and is up for a challenge.
I wouldn't say the game difficulty is as hard as Conquest Lunatic, you can still exploit enemy AI on Maddening by utilizing Bonded Shield with a cracked 1-2 range juggernaut (i.e. Ivy, Mage Knight Pandreo) that'll clear out entire enemy formations in one go. But there is absolutely a huge gap in difficulty going from Hard to Maddening
I THINK that if you fight a skirmish it's more likely one will appear again, but I don't think you can have more than 1 or 2 active in each over-world at any given time. So currently in my game I've got a skirmish on the main map, the divine paralogues map, and the fell xenologue map, all of which popped up pretty quickly once there was space for them to pop up (haven't used any of them though and no new ones have appeared)
9:28 I did like the game on hard, and it was hard to play through blind. No knowledge of ideal builds, map layouts and best units, it was a way of relaxing into the game and concisely enjoying the story (I enjoyed the story...), not even knowing how skill inheritance worked. After playing through on Hard I challenged Maddening with an idea of how the game worked, and struggled through the game. (As someone who looked forward to the game from its announcement, I finished both of these runs with no DLC, no updates like the well). I respect hard mode, but do agree that the true depth of Fire Emblem Engage's gameplay can only be appreciated in Maddening - where Divinely Inspiring makes a difference.
I found early game Madding Engage very fun and balanced. But the further I got the more I released it was more like Awakening. I switch to juggernaut with Alear and it became way easier.
Totally agree. As you touched on, unit discussion was semi impossible for a while following the games release, as the majority of players would swear by strategies that just didn’t work on maddening. It almost felt like groups of people playing the same game had actually played different games from each other. Game breaking DLC made that difference even greater.
@@Speedwinghere Lmao. Yunaka propaganda has definitely died down since release though, I mean It was wild back then. Anyway, I have seen similar happen with maddening discussion. In addition, we also have some there who swear by a unit being good because a dlc emblem makes them so. Generally speaking, I am surprised that intelligent systems has so little interest in having people experience any of the difficulty settings the same way that the playtesters presumably did, meaning without content that gives free ore, weapons, bracelets and XP that make one deviate greatly from the expected amount that the maps are designed around. I have no issues with this type of content being in the game, but Engage seems to actively want you to use it more so than any other game in the series, even though it harms the balance in this game more than any other. I mean what other fire emblem game force inputs the DLC resources into your inventory?
Because the game should never be judged on Maddening, only on Hard. Maddening is total nonsense. Every changes in Maddening makes the game obviously so much worse. Every bosses being Ike? Why not just making them immune to Emblem why you're at it, since you really don't want players to actually use the game mechanics.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 While I think bosses in maddening get a little too much special treatment, you're very off base. The game hands you so many powerful tools on a silver platter, that playing on anything except maddening will not give you proper appreciation for those tools. Maddening pushes your characters to their limits, where every turn is a mini-puzzle to solve. If you judged the game on hard mode, your conclusion would just be "do whatever you want because you're so overpowered it doesn't matter." Bosses being immune to break actually doesn't make as much difference as you would think. You can still outrange them, and reducing their HP to 0 still prevents a counterattack (even if they have bars remaining), and of course emblem attacks cannot be countered. As my characters got stronger, I found myself using break less and less against normal enemies, so I never missed it against bosses. Bosses having no class weakness whatsoever *does* bother me, though, as it strips away a core part of class identity. I think the game would have been better if bosses still had a 2x weakness - or at *least* 1.5x - on maddening.
@@caliburnleaf9323 No weaknesses is definitely a more impactful change. That was my main issue with Ike, being an armored Class with no weaknesses seemed like cheating. Though, I'll admit, my only experience is my first Playthrough, on Hard Mode, where I decided to go without Reclass, which definitely made it harder it probably should be.
Idk if you can do this in maddening, but you have access to both the turnwheel and battle saves in hard mode. I've only played with hard mode so far and I was kinda confused when you said "people must've found the game too easy on hard" tbh. I'm veteran of the series (not a pro or something but I've played almost every game in the franchise) and I used the tyme crystal a lot on each map. Earlier on in the maps it was when I went "oh that was dumb, I sould have moved that unit there instead, yeah it's worth a use to redo that" but in the majority of maps I later ended up having to really think about if a use was worth it or not even for major displacement because I was running REALLY low. Heck I think in the later half of the game there's more maps where I ran out of uses than ones I didn't. And I used battle saves when I ran out of uses more than I care to admit lol. It wasn't on EVERY map but... yeah, more than I would've expected. I think it just speaks to the balance of engage personally. The game makes sure you can't cheese it so you still need to stop and think about your every move even if the game isn't really THAT hard. Now that I think about it, maybe I wouldn't have TOO much trouble playing on maddening. I never really shut my brain off or anything during my playthrough, I never really juggernauted as far as I remember. Sure, sometimes I made setups to have something like a 3% hit rate and I dodged everything that went my way, but my unit never really killed everything in retallion when that happened. It was usually like Yunaka with the corrin ring so she can't do much damage. I did everything I could all the time to get the best results so I'm sure maddening would be a suitable challenge for me, even if I'll spam that tyme crystal. But tbh maybe most of my uses of the tyme crystal were when maps jumpscared me with something I didn't know about, mistakes, dumb stuff I didn't see, etc. Stuff that would prob happen on any difficilty anyway. But it does worry me because I've found out I'm an extremely slow player who took over a 100 hours to beat engage on just hard so maddening would be even worse. I have issues with making a dfinitive decision about stuff instead of rethinking and rethinking to find what's most optimal and stuff. That problem would be even worse on maddening lol.
I play on hard classic normally and I enjoy it just as some simple FE fun but when I did my first complete maddening run it absolutely kicked my butt, I’m glad I can say I’ve beaten the game on maddening and had fun for most of it but I don’t intend to do it again. My one real crowning achievement was one rounding the final boss with a halberdier Goldmary
Speedwing calls me a baby in his thumbnail 😢 I've never actually played an archaic-word-for-mental-illness difficulty (lunatic/maniac/maddening) because I like using goofy units like Flashing Fist Framme and General Lapis.
Framme is still good in Maddening, she just takes longer in the oven before punching things is valid for more than breaking a mage. Forged fist weapons are very powerful
There’s a common misconception that one NEEDS to make optimal builds to beat the hardest difficulty of fire emblem games. This isn’t true at all, and that alone is proven by people doing first playthroughs on the hardest difficulty for each game, meaning they literally can’t know what’s optimal, or how half the game mechanics even work, and manage to clear the game anyway. Optimal builds will make it easier, but it’s not necessary, and what’s most important is playing well regardless of build anyway. Also, flashing fist Framme is actually pretty good as a means to quickly recharge an emblem ring or even one round on top of that when combined with lunar brace or gentility/bravery plus. It’s commonly used on maddening. Someone also found success with a general Chloe on maddening no dlc. They even have a video up about it.
A few days ago I beat Maddening for the first time. The first chapters were somewhat difficult, especially chapter 5. After chapter 7, I did the DLC, and Tiki and Hector were tedious and tough. Veronika was the easiest, Chrom was very difficult, and Soren... WAS A NIGHTMARE. Camila was just tedious. From chapter 8 to 21 and 22, I didn't have many problems (except Eirika), but from chapter 23 to the end (including the Pact Ring and Marth), it was extremely hard, and the final chapter literally took me 5 HOURS.
I don't play maddening, i just do self imposed challenges on hard like my most recent playthrough being a female only mage class only with everyone either being a sage or their pref class that uses magic, i got up to chapter 21 before before doing the rest on normal bc i didnt want to spend ages grinding and just wanted to finish it off. Though I might do another playthrough but with only the sniper/bow classes. I also did the same challenge with conquest but only using the maid/butler class which took like 2 playthroughs to beat
Yeah this video has convinced me they could have just made another difficult by not buff the stats, remove most of these mechanics and give bosses veteran+ and you could have made a fourth difficulty
We already had some discussions about the difference in Awakening and 3H being at least similarly massive (imo even more so in terms of stats, but Engage has more mechanical changes I'd say), but overall I agree and think it colored a lot of the discussion. The sentiment "muh units oneshot everything with Emblem abilities" or whatever really feels like a hard mode sentiment where people just steamrolled through without thinking much and thus got that impression. Engage Maddening isn't the hardest in the series by any stretch, but playing it blind and having to figure out how to use all these new abilities to contend with the strong and numerous enemies made it a super enjoyable experience. And most FEtubers are just missing that perspective completely. Oh also Yunaka is still alright on Maddening, check out my highly entertaining, no commentary, No Emblem playthrough. Also could have used some words about the DLC, but maybe that deserves its own video how badly the Engage DLC is implemented.
I didn't want to touch on the DLC here at all as that's its own kettle of fish, but yeah it suffers from the same issue of not knowing if someone used it or not when they're trying to discuss engage
Engage maddening with and without game knowledge are completely different experiences, and that's even before getting into the weeds of playing without/without well, fixed or random growths, update bonuses, or dlc and it's various bonuses. Modern Fire Emblem in general has a lot of modularity and variables compared to the older games (something the discourse hasn't really caught up to in a lot of ways), and in Engage especially, it's pretty hard to have any kind of gameplay talk without having to first draft up an abstract of that playthrough's "ruleset" that nobody wants to have to think about
I saw one person saying "conquest is bad, you have to pay for grind" Well, it's not my fault you are bad at FE, finsihing awakening and 3H on hard with grinding doesnt mean you are good. And the game literally says that conquest rout doesn't have grind when you choose one of the e paths Play conquest on normal, doing the basic 20/20 and using two or three strong units are enough. Then i saw the same comment about engage skirmshes. They want to train EVERYONE but cant becuase skirmshes are harder. Well, skirmshes levels are based on your strongest units so ... I just think how funny engage is because all the grind methods are just annoying, but for players like who like doind a more old school way of no grind, one map after another, engage maddening is one of the best experience I had in the series
I think the gap in difficulty between hard and maddening is warranted here. Emblems are extremely flexible and broken tools PROVIDED you know how to make good use of them. While some of them are extremely straightforward others are less obvious to figure out. Hard mode tries to give you a semblance of a challenge while still accounting for players who are new and unused to this. It lets you learn how things work and gives you room for experimentation. You can make mistakes, you can do dumb shit and you can have fun figuring out how your new toys work without worrying too much about screwing yourself. In maddening however the game assumes you know your shit so it has to compensate by throwing you into swathes of stat inflated enemies. It punishes you for wasting time and pushes you to take initiative. This isn't a bad thing as really this is what the game should do- it tests you on how well you can make use of the tools at your disposal. The following are just examples from my maddening run so you can ignore this. I found Eirika to be kind of useless on hard mode. Why would I use lunar brace against high defense enemies when I could just use magic instead? But after giving it a think, I grabbed Alcryst (he has luna), gave him a brave bow, gave him some speed boosters, and slapped eirika on him. The end result was a unit that could oneshot a health bar off the final boss. Had a sword power 5 Celine with a forged +5 Levin sword using while being engaged to Alear (which gives her +5 to all stats for 4 turns). Had my ike user inherit pair up from corrin so I could have a juggernaut who was immune to chain attacks. I haven't done this yet or at all but I know you can use leif to create a vantage wrath panette which might be the most broken unit in the game??? corrin on any covert unit pretty much gives you a very effective dodge tank for the few chapters after shes introduced. This would break chapters with choke points. With a long bow you can very comfortably immobilize groups of enemies to buy yourself time.
The leif panette thing is wild bit ot requires a lot of careful management and making sure she doesn't go above a certain bond level so she doesn't get access to other weapons
I fundamentally disagree with the enemy units ignoring your units if they can't do damage because odds are, you're using resources, skill slots, map features such as terrain and any other number of other systems to get that tanky/dodgy in the first place. The game getting to just say "no" to a strategy you've positioned your units carefully and potentially spent multiple chapters building up, it is an entire other feeling of unsatisfying. Optimizing the threat out of a boss or group of enemies is its own brand of fun, and its own type of challenge. To have the game just be able to go "nuh uh" if it happens naturally instead of via something like Chain Guard/Bonded Shield is frankly insulting. Especially when Engage already has anti-juggernauting mechanics like chain attacks.
There's an interesting relationship between Juggernauting and Skirmishes. Since Skirmishes are based on your strongest units, if you only focus on the same units, it will make training all other units that much harder to train (that's what happened to me when Zelkov and Yunaka ended up being the only units who could deal with Skirmishes (and again not always, because of chain attacks)
While I think your point is true imo it's actually the fact that engage maddening is "close enough" to hard that makes people feel confident in their takes. See for games like 3h or awakening people know that hard and maddening/lunatic are so drastically different in terms of difficulty that the two modes basically have completely different metas although the one that's more discussed is obviously the one for the higher difficulty. I'd put engage in the same ballpark as cq hard vs lunatic but at least in cq it's not just the ai that changes but also enemies have skills and also some maps have reinforcements so most map strategies are completely different because they account for these things. Engage has overall smaller changes to the difficulty like unbreakable bosses and the exp cut on top of the said ai changes that makes it look like you can get away with the same strats but you actually can't.
The amount of units on the maps changes on engage as well, but yeah I think engage gives the impression to many people that hard and maddening are similar when they're not really
Unbreakable bosses is a huge change to me though. I had my first (and only as of now) playthrough on Hard (which means it was harder than it actually is, because I didn't know/wanted to use the game mechanics. I went without Reclassing for example) Ike being the only unbreakable boss made it so much harder to deal with than most of the rest.
I definitely still made great use of Yunaka on Maddening. But if you want to trivialize the game, even on Maddening, Panette is your girl. Panette with Ike was by FAAAR my maddening MVP. She was vantage crit one rounding everyone. And she was tanky enough to leave on her own.
I will also say that my friends who I showed the game to, thought the game *was* hard, and then wanted to grind their units on skirmishes because they were scared of dying. I tried to tell them that it's okay. You have all these tools but they insisted on grinding. There was also a friend of mine that tried to sound cool or something saying he was playing pn lunatic on his first playthrough like I was. But then he mentioned how many skirmishes there were while I had like, one.
Yeah the skirmish difference is huge, I think its probably set number on maddening but a refreshing amount based on time for hard if I had to hazard a guess
To be fair, it's a pretty small gap compared to Awakening's hard to Lunatic, but I admit I was baffled when I went to try hard mode after completing my first few runs in Maddening. The way I like to talk about it is that Chapter 11 has you running for dear life in maddening, whereas in hard mode you can just farm all the enemies (including the hounds) for more experience.
Been playing hard for my first playthrough because I didn't have the time or willpower to get into Engage until very recently. It's really fun but "Conquest Normal" is a great comparison. Lots of good map design that gets unfortunately solved by a few very strong units. I did do some silly things like heavily invest in Clanne and give him Sigurd (best unit in my army currently with a wind+4). I plan on playing Maddening once I finish my stroll through Hard though - at first I thought you were saying that Maddening was poorly tuned, but now I'm realizing it's likely the opposite, and hard is too forgiving. Also, due to the time crystal I didn't know about the retain XP thing but that's hilarious. The game rewards failure on hard mode lol.
Not really. Unless you really messed up badly, you generally prefer to go back a few turns instead of losing all your time. Chapters are long enough it's rarely worth it, unless you lose early on. When it's really powerful, however, is with Skirmishes. Being able to farm exp twice or more in a chapter is pretty insane ngl.
Maybe it's because I only did one playthrough on hard and didn't use everything at my disposal, but saying Engage hard ~= Conquest normal sounds genuinely stupid.
l remember my first playthrough of Engage being hard and l specifically thought "lmma try Alear solo," since so many of the previous titles can be solo'd by the lord. Sure enough, wasn't difficult. The only challenging map was the final one where the reinforcements are literally endless...l remember spending over 3 hours as Alear only got to move one title every two turns. Then l did Maddeding and the difference was night and day as you said. Have since done, like, 5 maddening runs all with different teams and builds. Fucking lo*e this game.
Not being able to break the Bosses makes them way worse. In Hard, facing Ike is memorable because you can't use any of your common tactics. If every single bosses is Ike, Ike isn't unique anymore. Being able to break the blss *is* what makes Boss Battle so good in the first place (in my opinion, ofc. But I agree with it 100%) Well, to be fair, they're doing something different but equally interesting, that exemplifies the difference between Maddening and Hard. Bosses in Hard are a test. They're much more powerful than everyone else, but they still play fair (except Ike who's too cool for rules 😎). You need to understand how all games mechanics works and how/when to use them to win. Bosses in Maddening are a challenge. They force you to use everything and then some to compete. I do admit I really prefer the first one. I like when the game follows it's own rules, and don't "Break" them like in Maddening.
I think the Corrin-Yunaka strategy in general is hyper overrated and I'm saying this with Yunaka being my favourite Engage-Character. Mage-Yunaka is goated though. Lets you actually go ZAPPY with Thunder Tomes, which may not be OP, but it gives you 100 style points, which is what it's all about.
I might agree that Engage maddening is as hard as conquest lunatic. But it’s not nearly as satisfying. I can play Conquest Lunatic with a diverse range of units. I almost beat the entirely of Conquest with only Maids, only being softlocked at Iago. Engage, some units are completely useless. And experimenting with emblems and skills will waste your resources. I find Engage Maddening to be significantly less fun than Conquest Maddening and even Engage Hard mode.
So basically a microcosm of Fell Xenologue's difficulty differences. And this sounds like the worst of both worlds - I play most FE games on hard because they're challenging enough to be interesting, but not strict or restrictive in what you can do. And If I have to play on maddening to have any fun with the game (cause the story sure as hell won't pick up the slack), that sounds like a bad time.
Skirmishes indeed are limited on Maddening, the first is after the great escape, the second is after ch17 I think, and the third... I don't remember. They do however appear in mass after you beat Sombron because IS wanted to give you some grinding to prepare for the harder postgame maps and give you a way to farm the orbs to boost engage weapons Another ""fun"" fact about the skirmishes, since the Elusia throne room is abandoned after the great escape, it's fog of war if you happen to get a battle there. I always like to test myself and do the super brutal battles ASAP to get a nice reward but I didn't do that one until I got all the missing emblems, I'm not that of a masochist
I really disliked engage on release because hard mode was way too easy and boring. Igave it another try on maddening later on and it clicked. I think there needs to be a difficulty between hard and maddening, the gap is just so big and when you go into the game blind you have no way of knowing if its going to be the bullshit kind of maddening like in 3H and awakening or an actually fun well balanced difficulty.
To maybe give a little extra context on the enemy stat scaling too, normal gives a -15% to all stats while hard is 0 and maddening is +20%ish across the board. Coupled with a lot of normal and hard enemies also having flat stat penalties while maddening enemies typically are 0 or +, things get crazy fast. Imo it ends up feel like you just have easy, normal, and maddening when factoring everything in which is kinda lame. I have only managed to finish one non-maddening run ever just due to how mind numbing hard and normal are
It would be interesting if you could adjust these individually. Have a setting for enemy stats, enemy ai, exp and other things (arena exp, retain exp on defeat, ...) and growth rates (which is already toggleable). I think that would lead to the best experience.
Honestly, I find Engage Maddening disappointing. Engage does two massive mistakes: Stat Bloat and Overbearing Unit Diversity. In FE, beating an enemy with a single action is a massive advantage, so the combination of these two traits heavily rewards builds that are capable of beating every kind of enemy, therefore, specialized builds suffer. Pretty much only two kinds of units end up being useful here: Magic Juggernauts, who easily clean large amounts of enemies & Tanks, whose job of drawing aggro for lesser units to snatch easy picking is pretty much unchanged but at best can build to take a kill or two with crits. Both of these issue aren't present in CQ Enemies only get better Stats from Normal to Hard, Lunatic is pretty much just more enemies, tighter objectives and sporadic abilities. These traits make unit building extremely rewarding specially since they encourage mastery over Fates main mechanic: Pair Up and Dual Strike. For example, a unit I love building is Kaze, because he gets L&D, Vantage and Replicate. Thanks to this he can become an unkillable vantage tank by doing Dual Strikes with his Replica! By stacking enough damage to compensate for Ninja's low Str stats enables 1.5 hit ko ranges on very specific enemies like Hinoka's Aegis Pegasi, who can't be beaten by the usual Super Mages or Xander! More over, with S and A+ reclasses he can get enough power to beat Ninjas, Samurai and MoAs in the Ryoma chapter. This would be useless in Engage because HAving to deal with bulky enemies in EVERY chapter means all the investment he'd need are better spent on more generic powerful units, which is something that soils most of Engage's units
I'm not sure I understand the difference between putting vantage on Kaze to one round thing or putting vantage on wrath panette to one round things honestly
@@Speedwinghere if that's the case, then the difference is Pannette is stronger and more splashable. What I like of this Kaze is that he has this niche endgame, the rest of the game he's a decent knife user that tanks magic, not a Juggernaut like her
Idk maddening was difficult but fun, and you could beat it without being bottlenecked into one strategy or unit composition. was it even possible to beat awakening lunatic+ without a def boon nosferatu avatar solo run with chrom as the pair bot, or the 3H maddening wyvern squad, stride gambit warp skip every boss kill start? And if the answer has “DLC” in it, Nintendo already suckered you
In terms of both those games I don't see that as difficulty but rather unfairness, through things such as same turn reinforcements. But I do get your point
I just don't play the hardest difficulty of most Fe games as it's just not fun to optimize a map in the best way possible. Most players would need to break the rules anyways to even get through fights or grind up which doesn't like a fun time. I would change stuff for 3ds and post Awakening. Give the renown rewards immediately to buff up robin and get extra weapons. Would also add a master seal so you can class up a unit. Like Lissa for example if she gets to 10. Fates same with the rewards so you have less insentive to dance grind azura. That and the captured units but add a feature where you can get them at their base level for that file so haitaka or rally man can be used which again gives some extra strategy to it. Dlc too if a player wants a bit more to use. Remember corrin does go to his pocket world meaning in story it makes sense Echoes add a harder mode and let every unit evolve immediately. The guys in alms army all having the opportunity to go up as soon as they start would just help the game be played more. 3 houses just be more fun. The maps are so bland being the same thing. Wish you appeared in different sides for the routes to show which side you are on and make the game feel fresh with it's limited maps. Some stages feel like they could be harder in a different spot being surrounded. Engage let us choose our weapons to forge in the well. I think that would give players more time to want to throw good weapons to get a specific one. That and dlc rings like dlc characters being given automatically after beating them one time in any file. Nothing spices up a file run more than more flexibility Basically. Give players mire resources to start and use more systems. To base players who want to play pure. Nothing is stopping that. To less experienced players who want a bit of a boost they can also play harder versions. Be a lot more inviting
Except FE 11, 12 and awakening you can "easily" play every FE game at max difficulty without a perfect optimization. Sure using every best character in their best class and using perfect strategies in maps make the game easier, but the games leave you with enough leeway to experiment without being perfect.
@@neko.senshi no it doesn't. Some enemies have broken lunatic plus builds that are literally impossible to protect from leading to reset time. Even chapter one going UNGA BUNGA won't do good with a proc unless you wanna say dual guard needs to go off more. There is a difference between set up to take the enemy hits and taking longer time to pot shot. It's really nice if you can have the extra resources to patch up missing a level up buff you wanted on a unit as some entire runs get dropped for missing a def or atk up. Plus could you really convince a full casual that it's fun to look at the same map and then later slow play
@@ivanbluecool what doesn't? Meta characters and perfect strategies making the map easier, or the games leaving you with enough leeway to experiment? In any case I clearly said "except FE 11, 12 and awakening" as 11 and 12 are brutally hard while awakening is straight up up to RNG and unfair
@@neko.senshi contradicting your earlier statement now with awakening. Or you didn't check what you wrote. Either way it's exactly what I said. How different is one lunatic run from another if you are all given the most limited of units funds or items. Fates same thing with haitaka being needed for norh path as his use is just a cut above any unit you could use same with class. That at least forces you to have some use in the hub world and a bit more customized if you go out to get more captured units. Meanwhile the older games are definitely formulaic
The thing for the comparison to 3H is that maddening difficulty didnt come out with the game. People played it on hard first because it was the harder difficulty, and maddening got delivered later as an update. Another factor in favor of 3H not losing players in this span of time is that its a game with multiple routes, that basically screams for you to play it multiple times even if it's not warranted. So most people started on hard, played their second playthrough on maddening and only the most commited ones did their third or fourth playthrough. There's also the fact that maddening was poorly implemented in 3h besides the fact that it was later development. They didnt do any real ai changes, only changed regular reinforcements to ambush without considering the map design and just bumped enemy stats and gave them some skills and job's done, that's it. They knew the game was easy enough to break and you had turnwheel and all that stuff, so they clearly didn't care much. Meanwhile, Engage was balanced around all its difficulties. Normal was for first time FE fans or really bad ones, Hard for someone with a modicum experience and maddening for the veterans of the series. It was actually designed with the map design in mind, and it was actually balanced for a first play (it was delivered with the base game after all). Since people had bad experiences with difficulty in the last game, they didnt have any faith in this one. A shame for everyone involved.
In Fire Emblem, Easy Mode is Accessible Mode, Hard Mode is Easy Mode, and Maddening Mode is the actual game. But then sometimes they hit you with the fe12/fe13 highest difficulties as a funny joke
@@Speedwinghere I never had problems with it, but granted I only played Edelgard Maddening without New game + and New Game + made the other maddening routes extremely easy. Perhaps I just got lucky in crimson dawn. maybe I should do Golden Deer or Blue Lion without new game +.
@ Ok I’ve gotten pretty far into a Golden Deer run, even decided not to rely on avoid tanking and not using the DLC… i didn’t realize how much easier Edelgard made the game.
Gotta disagree on juggernaut not being fun. Robin being built up from zero to hero was extremely fun in awakening. Honestly what I wish we could get in awakening and fates was the renown rewards being given immediately to give some extra weapons or bonuses for less skilled players could play the hardest difficulty with some help. Engage I don't like the level sliders. Ruins the experience for me. Wish it could be toggled. Same with the dlc needing to be best each time. Small differences in how each game does things can go a long way.
Juggernauting can be fun. But when it’s by far the easiest option it’s not. Awakening Lunatic strongly punishes you for using multiple units. If I spend dozens of hours investing in 3-5 units, they shouldn’t fall off just because they aren’t a sorcerer with Nosferatu. Engage has a similar problem just to a lesser extent, I find juggernauting with Lyn funny, but it should not make the game easier. And my units that I’ve invested in though out the entire game should be dealing more damage than 5 per attack in the late game.
@@princestarfy4098 engage punishes too much on level sliders connecting them with the MC's level and overall army. Wish that was removed as grind isn't an option it's just bullying if you wanted to do the dlc and bonus maps apart from main game. Awakening later units don't have much of a use. Game giving you the renown rewards early would probably do better overall to build up your army. But juggernaut play is basically most of the games as engage yunaka can just dodge crit. Seth in sacred stones. Sigurd can solo being a main lord jagen and so on.
@@ivanbluecool My Louis, Zelkov, Panette and Marrin were extremely useful thoughout the game then all of a sudden around the boat map they became practically useless. I switched to avoid tanking with Alear Wolf knight with Lyn and I found it funny, but way easier and way less satisfying. Awakening I wanted to do Lunatic without Sorcerers and save sorcerer Robin for Lunaitc +, I got to Walhart and my Stahlt sword master and my sniper Virion, and even my Fredrick became useless. Only Robin and Chrom could deal any meaningful damage. I enjoy juggernauting but these are not fun versions of difficultly. I beat most of Conquest lunatic with only maids as a meme run. Only getting stuck on Iago’s stupid rod spamming map. If I try to use Jade in Engage Maddening I loose. She is unusable in maddening. This is not fun levels of difficulty. This is limiting viable options to an extreme.
@@ITNODoveI mean depends how you look at it. If there is a whole other part of a game that a player hasn't touched yet, did they really beat it? On the flipside, what about unlockable difficulties or new game plus'? Doesn't it count as beating the game if I have to get to the end of the game to unlock them?
@Jack Jo I feel like as long as you got to the end and saw the credits, you beat the game. Difficulties, optional content, new game plus, all those sorts of things are great to have, but I wouldn't say they're necessary to say you won.
I agree. I tried an iron man on hard and gave up on chapter 14 just because Anna was too good. I was just killing everything. Then I played maddening and lost my iron man on chapter 20
Wait, Engage Hard mode is too easy? Maddening difficulty is like sticking your hand in an ant mound to prove your tough. Is that an Archer Panette? Mission: Remove Wasp Nest. Normal- Call the exterminator Hard- A can of Raid and a stick. Maddening- Barehanded, broad daylight, no assistance
Now you see, Engage itself is just mid. Playing hard or maddening doesn't make a game better in this case. I rest my case. (Mostly a joke, I hate this game, but won't same people who like aspects of this game, only if its their favorite for gameplay and story (espically that part) reasons.)
Sounds like Cope, i lost all my units in awakening Normal and my wife left me.
many such cases
She took the child units…
She used you to inherit Axefaire and dipped. Classic gold digger moment unfortunately 😔
Engage Maddening has some of my favorite gameplay in the series (along with CQ and FE12 Lunatic modes) but unlike those games I've never actually played Engage on lower difficulties, so when you showed the "retry map but retain EXP" feature that Hard mode has you should have seen the double take I did. I knew from some of the takes I see online that Hard mode had to be a totally different world than Maddening, but that's just a genuinely unhinged feature to have in a strategy game lmao.
Great discussion man! Yeah a lot of the “meta” is strange especially between the FeTuber sphere since a lot of them haven’t actually completed the game on maddening. I don’t think it actually outpaces 3H or Awakening in terms so disparity between hard and maddening, but it’s definitely noticeable enough that you’re almost playing a different game.
Bruh, I take like 30-40 minutes on each map on Engage hard mode, it hurts my soul hearing everyone call it easy ;_;
Welcome to the fire emblem fanbase where if you havent beaten thracia 776 with one hand tied behind your back and your eyes closed then you're a worthless filthy casual
It is easy for people that know the series and have any strategic bone in them, but it is fun for people that just play it in their own pace!
Anybody who plays hard is a casual who can't even play the game. Anyone who plays on less than Super Ultra Mega Death Lunacy Masochism Mode is a scrub who needs to nut up and play a REAL Fire Emblem game with a REAL difficulty, like Sacred Stones. /s love the vids
So true
@@fseifgwevgwef
Fire Emblem is only a true challenge if your lord has a 10% chance of having a heart attack each turn.
@@princestarfy4098bismix was right
nice troll post... if you would meean it for sure, you not have a live
What I super appreciate about Maddening is that the stat inflation takes its sweet time. Lots of games in the series with hard modes have the stat inflation be absurd right out the gate and it makes the early maps incredibly repetitive and frustrating because you'll basically have the same tools to deal with them on every run. The game doesn't start getting truly terrifying until you've had a chance to start making your resources unique to your run.
On maddening there are a total of 4 skirmishes. One after ch11. Two more after ch17. And the last one appears after ch22.
Thank you, I figured it was set amount
I just love the unique component that dodge-tanks / defense tanks can become light runes on maddening. I also like drawing the attention of backup enemies because they’ll only be hit by the backups and not the primary attacker.
Theres a reason its called Maddening, its because I would go insane if I had to play it. Seriously I already found Hard mode to be ball-bustingly difficult compared to what i was used to
I legit didnt know about the retain EXP thing though, Im not gonna lie I LOVE that as an optional feature for players who are having a tough time with ANY difficulty.
Meanwhile my noob ass was happy to make it through normal classic because I'd always choose casual/deathless in the games I'd played before
Well shit brother congrats !
I only ever played on maddening. When I lost a couple ironmans I wanted to bump down the difficulty but the fact that the entire game is trivialized by funny foggy yunaka just made it pointless to even try.
On a different note please allow me to dump my arguments for why yunaka is still amazing on maddening:
-Great stats as an early prepromote not requiring a master seal
-Only unit with knife access (unless you wanted to reclass someone to thief in the early game for some reason) with knifes having powerful and cheap forges
-Not being targeted in terrain allows to run in and kill/poison stuff and be safe on enemy phase potentially killing/poisoning them on subsequent turns as they run past
-She can pull emblem enemies while not getting finished off by the other enemeies due to them having 0 hit (terrain required).
-Starting out with the miccy ring on a chapter with high amounts of blue tiles firing 3 great sacs for massive exp/sp gain which coupled with her dagger forges and high stats (helps her kill even more enemies for even more exp/sp) gives her access to many great skills before you lose the rings
-Her competition in the early game is rather few. Everyone besides Chloe and maybe Louis either sucks or is average so she is a safe deploy for when things get dicey and you need a reliable juggernaut (early-mid game)
Aside from dagger forges she doesen't need any investment to make early game trivial and holds up later due to skills. She is just loaded with convenient advantages that snowball to make her hold up.
As someone who also used Yunaka on Maddening to great effect, let me continue.
Yunaka is very notable as being an early game juggernaut, but she does fall off……… right as you get Corrin.
Corrin with Yunaka is suuuuuuuuper good. Chain attacks are no longer a problem, you have portable Avo terrain, and she can lean into a support role really well with Corrin Engage.
And yes, Yunaka Avo Enemy phasing DOES work on Maddening. You just need to specifically rig the Avo so that the enemies have single digit hit rates. Maddening AI will only pass you if they have ZERO hit, 1% hit is fine for them. And even with the “invisibility,” Yunaka can still use that to her advantage to make/hold chokes, provide allies with Fog terrain completely safely, or just take free pot shots.
So yeah, Yunaka is still an amazing unit on Maddening.
But if you want to trivialize Maddening, Panette is where it’s at. 100% crit vantage with Ike does brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I've never actually played engage on hard because i liked playing 3h on maddening so i wanted to see if i could do it and i thought it was really good, probably the most fun I've had with a fire emblem game.
By the end merrin and panette were the only units that could actually kill anything and lapis (Erika) when engaged could one shot. My alear was a funny story because i found him to be dead weight all game so just used him as a corrin bot but decide to use roy on him and he all of a sudden became one of my best units. It was a fun first experience, later playthroughs i have more units that can actually kill because i know how to build units now
It’s weird because Maddening has a lower barrier to entry than previous Lunatic modes, in my experience. But anecdotally I guess it scales with so much more challenge.
I only did Conquest Hard, but I would say that Engage Maddening is only a little more difficult than that. Or maybe I’ve just gotten better at the games over the years and the difficulty increased even more.
When you said the stat inflation is 4 to 5 points, I was actually underwhelmed. While that's still a lot, it's nothing compared to the insanity that is Awakening Lunatic and Three Houses Maddening.
That's on top of your units on average being 6 levels lower
Fire emblem awakening hard and maddening (lunatic) was a HUGE difference
I tried hard and it was a snooze fest in the earlygame, meanwhile Maddening was pretty tough even at the early stages
Maddening was definitely much better in this game. I had expected it to be completely terrible after 3H.
I def recommend it to anyone who hasn't given it a shot and is up for a challenge.
I wouldn't say the game difficulty is as hard as Conquest Lunatic, you can still exploit enemy AI on Maddening by utilizing Bonded Shield with a cracked 1-2 range juggernaut (i.e. Ivy, Mage Knight Pandreo) that'll clear out entire enemy formations in one go. But there is absolutely a huge gap in difficulty going from Hard to Maddening
I THINK that if you fight a skirmish it's more likely one will appear again, but I don't think you can have more than 1 or 2 active in each over-world at any given time. So currently in my game I've got a skirmish on the main map, the divine paralogues map, and the fell xenologue map, all of which popped up pretty quickly once there was space for them to pop up (haven't used any of them though and no new ones have appeared)
9:28 I did like the game on hard, and it was hard to play through blind. No knowledge of ideal builds, map layouts and best units, it was a way of relaxing into the game and concisely enjoying the story (I enjoyed the story...), not even knowing how skill inheritance worked. After playing through on Hard I challenged Maddening with an idea of how the game worked, and struggled through the game. (As someone who looked forward to the game from its announcement, I finished both of these runs with no DLC, no updates like the well).
I respect hard mode, but do agree that the true depth of Fire Emblem Engage's gameplay can only be appreciated in Maddening - where Divinely Inspiring makes a difference.
I found early game Madding Engage very fun and balanced. But the further I got the more I released it was more like Awakening. I switch to juggernaut with Alear and it became way easier.
Totally agree. As you touched on, unit discussion was semi impossible for a while following the games release, as the majority of players would swear by strategies that just didn’t work on maddening. It almost felt like groups of people playing the same game had actually played different games from each other. Game breaking DLC made that difference even greater.
Even now I see it, with people holding the fact they're talking about hard until you question them about it
@@Speedwinghere Lmao. Yunaka propaganda has definitely died down since release though, I mean It was wild back then. Anyway, I have seen similar happen with maddening discussion. In addition, we also have some there who swear by a unit being good because a dlc emblem makes them so.
Generally speaking, I am surprised that intelligent systems has so little interest in having people experience any of the difficulty settings the same way that the playtesters presumably did, meaning without content that gives free ore, weapons, bracelets and XP that make one deviate greatly from the expected amount that the maps are designed around. I have no issues with this type of content being in the game, but Engage seems to actively want you to use it more so than any other game in the series, even though it harms the balance in this game more than any other. I mean what other fire emblem game force inputs the DLC resources into your inventory?
Because the game should never be judged on Maddening, only on Hard. Maddening is total nonsense.
Every changes in Maddening makes the game obviously so much worse. Every bosses being Ike? Why not just making them immune to Emblem why you're at it, since you really don't want players to actually use the game mechanics.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 While I think bosses in maddening get a little too much special treatment, you're very off base. The game hands you so many powerful tools on a silver platter, that playing on anything except maddening will not give you proper appreciation for those tools. Maddening pushes your characters to their limits, where every turn is a mini-puzzle to solve. If you judged the game on hard mode, your conclusion would just be "do whatever you want because you're so overpowered it doesn't matter."
Bosses being immune to break actually doesn't make as much difference as you would think. You can still outrange them, and reducing their HP to 0 still prevents a counterattack (even if they have bars remaining), and of course emblem attacks cannot be countered. As my characters got stronger, I found myself using break less and less against normal enemies, so I never missed it against bosses.
Bosses having no class weakness whatsoever *does* bother me, though, as it strips away a core part of class identity. I think the game would have been better if bosses still had a 2x weakness - or at *least* 1.5x - on maddening.
@@caliburnleaf9323 No weaknesses is definitely a more impactful change.
That was my main issue with Ike, being an armored Class with no weaknesses seemed like cheating.
Though, I'll admit, my only experience is my first Playthrough, on Hard Mode, where I decided to go without Reclass, which definitely made it harder it probably should be.
I dont really play maddening because i dont find it a very fun difficulty so i didnt really know how insane the differences were.
Pardon me, I need that 8:20 Vander pic, thank you
Idk if you can do this in maddening, but you have access to both the turnwheel and battle saves in hard mode.
I've only played with hard mode so far and I was kinda confused when you said "people must've found the game too easy on hard" tbh. I'm veteran of the series (not a pro or something but I've played almost every game in the franchise) and I used the tyme crystal a lot on each map. Earlier on in the maps it was when I went "oh that was dumb, I sould have moved that unit there instead, yeah it's worth a use to redo that" but in the majority of maps I later ended up having to really think about if a use was worth it or not even for major displacement because I was running REALLY low. Heck I think in the later half of the game there's more maps where I ran out of uses than ones I didn't. And I used battle saves when I ran out of uses more than I care to admit lol. It wasn't on EVERY map but... yeah, more than I would've expected.
I think it just speaks to the balance of engage personally. The game makes sure you can't cheese it so you still need to stop and think about your every move even if the game isn't really THAT hard. Now that I think about it, maybe I wouldn't have TOO much trouble playing on maddening. I never really shut my brain off or anything during my playthrough, I never really juggernauted as far as I remember. Sure, sometimes I made setups to have something like a 3% hit rate and I dodged everything that went my way, but my unit never really killed everything in retallion when that happened. It was usually like Yunaka with the corrin ring so she can't do much damage. I did everything I could all the time to get the best results so I'm sure maddening would be a suitable challenge for me, even if I'll spam that tyme crystal. But tbh maybe most of my uses of the tyme crystal were when maps jumpscared me with something I didn't know about, mistakes, dumb stuff I didn't see, etc. Stuff that would prob happen on any difficilty anyway. But it does worry me because I've found out I'm an extremely slow player who took over a 100 hours to beat engage on just hard so maddening would be even worse. I have issues with making a dfinitive decision about stuff instead of rethinking and rethinking to find what's most optimal and stuff. That problem would be even worse on maddening lol.
The thing about engage is for the most part its pretty fair, so you have the tools its just a matter of understanding how to use them
You mentioned Fates as an example, because it's the only fire emblem game ever that has a better Hard to Maddening difficulty curve lol.
I play on hard classic normally and I enjoy it just as some simple FE fun but when I did my first complete maddening run it absolutely kicked my butt, I’m glad I can say I’ve beaten the game on maddening and had fun for most of it but I don’t intend to do it again. My one real crowning achievement was one rounding the final boss with a halberdier Goldmary
I don't have Engage, but I will consider playing Maddening in my imagination since I can't afford the game. Thanks, Speedwinghere.
Speedwing calls me a baby in his thumbnail 😢
I've never actually played an archaic-word-for-mental-illness difficulty (lunatic/maniac/maddening) because I like using goofy units like Flashing Fist Framme and General Lapis.
Framme is still good in Maddening, she just takes longer in the oven before punching things is valid for more than breaking a mage. Forged fist weapons are very powerful
You like to actually play the game,. You want to actually "engage" with the mechanics and make clever uses of them.
There’s a common misconception that one NEEDS to make optimal builds to beat the hardest difficulty of fire emblem games. This isn’t true at all, and that alone is proven by people doing first playthroughs on the hardest difficulty for each game, meaning they literally can’t know what’s optimal, or how half the game mechanics even work, and manage to clear the game anyway. Optimal builds will make it easier, but it’s not necessary, and what’s most important is playing well regardless of build anyway. Also, flashing fist Framme is actually pretty good as a means to quickly recharge an emblem ring or even one round on top of that when combined with lunar brace or gentility/bravery plus. It’s commonly used on maddening. Someone also found success with a general Chloe on maddening no dlc. They even have a video up about it.
A few days ago I beat Maddening for the first time.
The first chapters were somewhat difficult, especially chapter 5. After chapter 7, I did the DLC, and Tiki and Hector were tedious and tough. Veronika was the easiest, Chrom was very difficult, and Soren... WAS A NIGHTMARE. Camila was just tedious. From chapter 8 to 21 and 22, I didn't have many problems (except Eirika), but from chapter 23 to the end (including the Pact Ring and Marth), it was extremely hard, and the final chapter literally took me 5 HOURS.
Me who used Yunaka on Ike to clear the whole map (on maddening) 🔪😜
I love ALL Speedwinghere videos!!!! ❤
I don't play maddening, i just do self imposed challenges on hard like my most recent playthrough being a female only mage class only with everyone either being a sage or their pref class that uses magic, i got up to chapter 21 before before doing the rest on normal bc i didnt want to spend ages grinding and just wanted to finish it off. Though I might do another playthrough but with only the sniper/bow classes. I also did the same challenge with conquest but only using the maid/butler class which took like 2 playthroughs to beat
Yeah this video has convinced me they could have just made another difficult by not buff the stats, remove most of these mechanics and give bosses veteran+ and you could have made a fourth difficulty
You *start* on video of footage of the map that Maddening got me stuck on :( :(
We already had some discussions about the difference in Awakening and 3H being at least similarly massive (imo even more so in terms of stats, but Engage has more mechanical changes I'd say), but overall I agree and think it colored a lot of the discussion. The sentiment "muh units oneshot everything with Emblem abilities" or whatever really feels like a hard mode sentiment where people just steamrolled through without thinking much and thus got that impression. Engage Maddening isn't the hardest in the series by any stretch, but playing it blind and having to figure out how to use all these new abilities to contend with the strong and numerous enemies made it a super enjoyable experience. And most FEtubers are just missing that perspective completely.
Oh also Yunaka is still alright on Maddening, check out my highly entertaining, no commentary, No Emblem playthrough.
Also could have used some words about the DLC, but maybe that deserves its own video how badly the Engage DLC is implemented.
I didn't want to touch on the DLC here at all as that's its own kettle of fish, but yeah it suffers from the same issue of not knowing if someone used it or not when they're trying to discuss engage
Engage maddening with and without game knowledge are completely different experiences, and that's even before getting into the weeds of playing without/without well, fixed or random growths, update bonuses, or dlc and it's various bonuses. Modern Fire Emblem in general has a lot of modularity and variables compared to the older games (something the discourse hasn't really caught up to in a lot of ways), and in Engage especially, it's pretty hard to have any kind of gameplay talk without having to first draft up an abstract of that playthrough's "ruleset" that nobody wants to have to think about
I saw one person saying "conquest is bad, you have to pay for grind"
Well, it's not my fault you are bad at FE, finsihing awakening and 3H on hard with grinding doesnt mean you are good. And the game literally says that conquest rout doesn't have grind when you choose one of the e paths
Play conquest on normal, doing the basic 20/20 and using two or three strong units are enough.
Then i saw the same comment about engage skirmshes. They want to train EVERYONE but cant becuase skirmshes are harder.
Well, skirmshes levels are based on your strongest units so ...
I just think how funny engage is because all the grind methods are just annoying, but for players like who like doind a more old school way of no grind, one map after another, engage maddening is one of the best experience I had in the series
Conquest is still better since you don't need My Castle for acquiring skills.
i'm so glad i played maddening on my first playthrough, i definitely would not have had fun on hard mode lol
I couldnt agree more, first impressions really matter
I think the gap in difficulty between hard and maddening is warranted here.
Emblems are extremely flexible and broken tools PROVIDED you know how to make good use of them. While some of them are extremely straightforward others are less obvious to figure out.
Hard mode tries to give you a semblance of a challenge while still accounting for players who are new and unused to this. It lets you learn how things work and gives you room for experimentation. You can make mistakes, you can do dumb shit and you can have fun figuring out how your new toys work without worrying too much about screwing yourself.
In maddening however the game assumes you know your shit so it has to compensate by throwing you into swathes of stat inflated enemies. It punishes you for wasting time and pushes you to take initiative. This isn't a bad thing as really this is what the game should do- it tests you on how well you can make use of the tools at your disposal.
The following are just examples from my maddening run so you can ignore this.
I found Eirika to be kind of useless on hard mode. Why would I use lunar brace against high defense enemies when I could just use magic instead?
But after giving it a think, I grabbed Alcryst (he has luna), gave him a brave bow, gave him some speed boosters, and slapped eirika on him. The end result was a unit that could oneshot a health bar off the final boss.
Had a sword power 5 Celine with a forged +5 Levin sword using while being engaged to Alear (which gives her +5 to all stats for 4 turns).
Had my ike user inherit pair up from corrin so I could have a juggernaut who was immune to chain attacks.
I haven't done this yet or at all but I know you can use leif to create a vantage wrath panette which might be the most broken unit in the game???
corrin on any covert unit pretty much gives you a very effective dodge tank for the few chapters after shes introduced. This would break chapters with choke points. With a long bow you can very comfortably immobilize groups of enemies to buy yourself time.
The leif panette thing is wild bit ot requires a lot of careful management and making sure she doesn't go above a certain bond level so she doesn't get access to other weapons
I fundamentally disagree with the enemy units ignoring your units if they can't do damage because odds are, you're using resources, skill slots, map features such as terrain and any other number of other systems to get that tanky/dodgy in the first place. The game getting to just say "no" to a strategy you've positioned your units carefully and potentially spent multiple chapters building up, it is an entire other feeling of unsatisfying. Optimizing the threat out of a boss or group of enemies is its own brand of fun, and its own type of challenge. To have the game just be able to go "nuh uh" if it happens naturally instead of via something like Chain Guard/Bonded Shield is frankly insulting. Especially when Engage already has anti-juggernauting mechanics like chain attacks.
There's an interesting relationship between Juggernauting and Skirmishes.
Since Skirmishes are based on your strongest units, if you only focus on the same units, it will make training all other units that much harder to train (that's what happened to me when Zelkov and Yunaka ended up being the only units who could deal with Skirmishes (and again not always, because of chain attacks)
Alear wih a pacifier is so cute...
While I think your point is true imo it's actually the fact that engage maddening is "close enough" to hard that makes people feel confident in their takes.
See for games like 3h or awakening people know that hard and maddening/lunatic are so drastically different in terms of difficulty that the two modes basically have completely different metas although the one that's more discussed is obviously the one for the higher difficulty.
I'd put engage in the same ballpark as cq hard vs lunatic but at least in cq it's not just the ai that changes but also enemies have skills and also some maps have reinforcements so most map strategies are completely different because they account for these things.
Engage has overall smaller changes to the difficulty like unbreakable bosses and the exp cut on top of the said ai changes that makes it look like you can get away with the same strats but you actually can't.
The amount of units on the maps changes on engage as well, but yeah I think engage gives the impression to many people that hard and maddening are similar when they're not really
Unbreakable bosses is a huge change to me though.
I had my first (and only as of now) playthrough on Hard (which means it was harder than it actually is, because I didn't know/wanted to use the game mechanics. I went without Reclassing for example)
Ike being the only unbreakable boss made it so much harder to deal with than most of the rest.
I definitely still made great use of Yunaka on Maddening. But if you want to trivialize the game, even on Maddening, Panette is your girl.
Panette with Ike was by FAAAR my maddening MVP. She was vantage crit one rounding everyone. And she was tanky enough to leave on her own.
Panette gaming
I will also say that my friends who I showed the game to, thought the game *was* hard, and then wanted to grind their units on skirmishes because they were scared of dying.
I tried to tell them that it's okay. You have all these tools but they insisted on grinding.
There was also a friend of mine that tried to sound cool or something saying he was playing pn lunatic on his first playthrough like I was.
But then he mentioned how many skirmishes there were while I had like, one.
Yeah the skirmish difference is huge, I think its probably set number on maddening but a refreshing amount based on time for hard if I had to hazard a guess
To be fair, it's a pretty small gap compared to Awakening's hard to Lunatic, but I admit I was baffled when I went to try hard mode after completing my first few runs in Maddening. The way I like to talk about it is that Chapter 11 has you running for dear life in maddening, whereas in hard mode you can just farm all the enemies (including the hounds) for more experience.
Been playing hard for my first playthrough because I didn't have the time or willpower to get into Engage until very recently. It's really fun but "Conquest Normal" is a great comparison. Lots of good map design that gets unfortunately solved by a few very strong units. I did do some silly things like heavily invest in Clanne and give him Sigurd (best unit in my army currently with a wind+4). I plan on playing Maddening once I finish my stroll through Hard though - at first I thought you were saying that Maddening was poorly tuned, but now I'm realizing it's likely the opposite, and hard is too forgiving. Also, due to the time crystal I didn't know about the retain XP thing but that's hilarious. The game rewards failure on hard mode lol.
Not really. Unless you really messed up badly, you generally prefer to go back a few turns instead of losing all your time. Chapters are long enough it's rarely worth it, unless you lose early on.
When it's really powerful, however, is with Skirmishes. Being able to farm exp twice or more in a chapter is pretty insane ngl.
Maybe it's because I only did one playthrough on hard and didn't use everything at my disposal, but saying Engage hard ~= Conquest normal sounds genuinely stupid.
l remember my first playthrough of Engage being hard and l specifically thought "lmma try Alear solo," since so many of the previous titles can be solo'd by the lord.
Sure enough, wasn't difficult. The only challenging map was the final one where the reinforcements are literally endless...l remember spending over 3 hours as Alear only got to move one title every two turns.
Then l did Maddeding and the difference was night and day as you said. Have since done, like, 5 maddening runs all with different teams and builds. Fucking lo*e this game.
Not being able to break the Bosses makes them way worse.
In Hard, facing Ike is memorable because you can't use any of your common tactics.
If every single bosses is Ike, Ike isn't unique anymore.
Being able to break the blss *is* what makes Boss Battle so good in the first place (in my opinion, ofc. But I agree with it 100%)
Well, to be fair, they're doing something different but equally interesting, that exemplifies the difference between Maddening and Hard. Bosses in Hard are a test. They're much more powerful than everyone else, but they still play fair (except Ike who's too cool for rules 😎). You need to understand how all games mechanics works and how/when to use them to win.
Bosses in Maddening are a challenge. They force you to use everything and then some to compete.
I do admit I really prefer the first one. I like when the game follows it's own rules, and don't "Break" them like in Maddening.
Honestly id like maddening on engage more if it wasnt for fixed growths, most of the fun for me is dealing with the rng growths.
You get random growths after beating it once, but yeah it should have maybe been from having any difficulty clear first
@@Speedwinghere yeah, fixed growths just isnt fun.
I think the Corrin-Yunaka strategy in general is hyper overrated and I'm saying this with Yunaka being my favourite Engage-Character.
Mage-Yunaka is goated though. Lets you actually go ZAPPY with Thunder Tomes, which may not be OP, but it gives you 100 style points, which is what it's all about.
She actually has a reasonable magic base as well, peak performance
I might agree that Engage maddening is as hard as conquest lunatic. But it’s not nearly as satisfying. I can play Conquest Lunatic with a diverse range of units. I almost beat the entirely of Conquest with only Maids, only being softlocked at Iago. Engage, some units are completely useless. And experimenting with emblems and skills will waste your resources. I find Engage Maddening to be significantly less fun than Conquest Maddening and even Engage Hard mode.
So basically a microcosm of Fell Xenologue's difficulty differences.
And this sounds like the worst of both worlds - I play most FE games on hard because they're challenging enough to be interesting, but not strict or restrictive in what you can do. And If I have to play on maddening to have any fun with the game (cause the story sure as hell won't pick up the slack), that sounds like a bad time.
Skirmishes indeed are limited on Maddening, the first is after the great escape, the second is after ch17 I think, and the third... I don't remember. They do however appear in mass after you beat Sombron because IS wanted to give you some grinding to prepare for the harder postgame maps and give you a way to farm the orbs to boost engage weapons
Another ""fun"" fact about the skirmishes, since the Elusia throne room is abandoned after the great escape, it's fog of war if you happen to get a battle there. I always like to test myself and do the super brutal battles ASAP to get a nice reward but I didn't do that one until I got all the missing emblems, I'm not that of a masochist
I really disliked engage on release because hard mode was way too easy and boring. Igave it another try on maddening later on and it clicked.
I think there needs to be a difficulty between hard and maddening, the gap is just so big and when you go into the game blind you have no way of knowing if its going to be the bullshit kind of maddening like in 3H and awakening or an actually fun well balanced difficulty.
To maybe give a little extra context on the enemy stat scaling too, normal gives a -15% to all stats while hard is 0 and maddening is +20%ish across the board. Coupled with a lot of normal and hard enemies also having flat stat penalties while maddening enemies typically are 0 or +, things get crazy fast. Imo it ends up feel like you just have easy, normal, and maddening when factoring everything in which is kinda lame. I have only managed to finish one non-maddening run ever just due to how mind numbing hard and normal are
It would be interesting if you could adjust these individually.
Have a setting for enemy stats, enemy ai, exp and other things (arena exp, retain exp on defeat, ...) and growth rates (which is already toggleable). I think that would lead to the best experience.
Honestly, I find Engage Maddening disappointing.
Engage does two massive mistakes: Stat Bloat and Overbearing Unit Diversity. In FE, beating an enemy with a single action is a massive advantage, so the combination of these two traits heavily rewards builds that are capable of beating every kind of enemy, therefore, specialized builds suffer. Pretty much only two kinds of units end up being useful here: Magic Juggernauts, who easily clean large amounts of enemies & Tanks, whose job of drawing aggro for lesser units to snatch easy picking is pretty much unchanged but at best can build to take a kill or two with crits.
Both of these issue aren't present in CQ
Enemies only get better Stats from Normal to Hard, Lunatic is pretty much just more enemies, tighter objectives and sporadic abilities. These traits make unit building extremely rewarding specially since they encourage mastery over Fates main mechanic: Pair Up and Dual Strike.
For example, a unit I love building is Kaze, because he gets L&D, Vantage and Replicate. Thanks to this he can become an unkillable vantage tank by doing Dual Strikes with his Replica! By stacking enough damage to compensate for Ninja's low Str stats enables 1.5 hit ko ranges on very specific enemies like Hinoka's Aegis Pegasi, who can't be beaten by the usual Super Mages or Xander! More over, with S and A+ reclasses he can get enough power to beat Ninjas, Samurai and MoAs in the Ryoma chapter.
This would be useless in Engage because HAving to deal with bulky enemies in EVERY chapter means all the investment he'd need are better spent on more generic powerful units, which is something that soils most of Engage's units
I'm not sure I understand the difference between putting vantage on Kaze to one round thing or putting vantage on wrath panette to one round things honestly
@@Speedwinghere Can Pannette reach 100% crit?
@@marcoasturias8520 easily, I have multiple videos of it on the channel, along with using it in ironman runs
@@Speedwinghere if that's the case, then the difference is Pannette is stronger and more splashable.
What I like of this Kaze is that he has this niche endgame, the rest of the game he's a decent knife user that tanks magic, not a Juggernaut like her
Wait 7:42 that’s a thing in Hard mode? Lmao
Idk maddening was difficult but fun, and you could beat it without being bottlenecked into one strategy or unit composition. was it even possible to beat awakening lunatic+ without a def boon nosferatu avatar solo run with chrom as the pair bot, or the 3H maddening wyvern squad, stride gambit warp skip every boss kill start? And if the answer has “DLC” in it, Nintendo already suckered you
In terms of both those games I don't see that as difficulty but rather unfairness, through things such as same turn reinforcements. But I do get your point
I just don't play the hardest difficulty of most Fe games as it's just not fun to optimize a map in the best way possible. Most players would need to break the rules anyways to even get through fights or grind up which doesn't like a fun time. I would change stuff for 3ds and post
Awakening. Give the renown rewards immediately to buff up robin and get extra weapons. Would also add a master seal so you can class up a unit. Like Lissa for example if she gets to 10.
Fates same with the rewards so you have less insentive to dance grind azura. That and the captured units but add a feature where you can get them at their base level for that file so haitaka or rally man can be used which again gives some extra strategy to it. Dlc too if a player wants a bit more to use. Remember corrin does go to his pocket world meaning in story it makes sense
Echoes add a harder mode and let every unit evolve immediately. The guys in alms army all having the opportunity to go up as soon as they start would just help the game be played more.
3 houses just be more fun. The maps are so bland being the same thing. Wish you appeared in different sides for the routes to show which side you are on and make the game feel fresh with it's limited maps. Some stages feel like they could be harder in a different spot being surrounded.
Engage let us choose our weapons to forge in the well. I think that would give players more time to want to throw good weapons to get a specific one. That and dlc rings like dlc characters being given automatically after beating them one time in any file. Nothing spices up a file run more than more flexibility
Basically. Give players mire resources to start and use more systems. To base players who want to play pure. Nothing is stopping that. To less experienced players who want a bit of a boost they can also play harder versions. Be a lot more inviting
Except FE 11, 12 and awakening you can "easily" play every FE game at max difficulty without a perfect optimization. Sure using every best character in their best class and using perfect strategies in maps make the game easier, but the games leave you with enough leeway to experiment without being perfect.
@@neko.senshi no it doesn't. Some enemies have broken lunatic plus builds that are literally impossible to protect from leading to reset time. Even chapter one going UNGA BUNGA won't do good with a proc unless you wanna say dual guard needs to go off more.
There is a difference between set up to take the enemy hits and taking longer time to pot shot. It's really nice if you can have the extra resources to patch up missing a level up buff you wanted on a unit as some entire runs get dropped for missing a def or atk up.
Plus could you really convince a full casual that it's fun to look at the same map and then later slow play
@@ivanbluecool what doesn't? Meta characters and perfect strategies making the map easier, or the games leaving you with enough leeway to experiment? In any case I clearly said "except FE 11, 12 and awakening" as 11 and 12 are brutally hard while awakening is straight up up to RNG and unfair
@@neko.senshi contradicting your earlier statement now with awakening. Or you didn't check what you wrote. Either way it's exactly what I said. How different is one lunatic run from another if you are all given the most limited of units funds or items. Fates same thing with haitaka being needed for norh path as his use is just a cut above any unit you could use same with class. That at least forces you to have some use in the hub world and a bit more customized if you go out to get more captured units.
Meanwhile the older games are definitely formulaic
@@ivanbluecool i finished CQ Lunatic without Haitaka though?
The thing for the comparison to 3H is that maddening difficulty didnt come out with the game. People played it on hard first because it was the harder difficulty, and maddening got delivered later as an update. Another factor in favor of 3H not losing players in this span of time is that its a game with multiple routes, that basically screams for you to play it multiple times even if it's not warranted. So most people started on hard, played their second playthrough on maddening and only the most commited ones did their third or fourth playthrough.
There's also the fact that maddening was poorly implemented in 3h besides the fact that it was later development. They didnt do any real ai changes, only changed regular reinforcements to ambush without considering the map design and just bumped enemy stats and gave them some skills and job's done, that's it. They knew the game was easy enough to break and you had turnwheel and all that stuff, so they clearly didn't care much.
Meanwhile, Engage was balanced around all its difficulties. Normal was for first time FE fans or really bad ones, Hard for someone with a modicum experience and maddening for the veterans of the series. It was actually designed with the map design in mind, and it was actually balanced for a first play (it was delivered with the base game after all). Since people had bad experiences with difficulty in the last game, they didnt have any faith in this one. A shame for everyone involved.
Is there a reason to play Engage?
Yeah it's fun
Hard mode scrubs, maddening Chading
In Fire Emblem, Easy Mode is Accessible Mode, Hard Mode is Easy Mode, and Maddening Mode is the actual game. But then sometimes they hit you with the fe12/fe13 highest difficulties as a funny joke
Normal Mode is Easy Mode, Hard Mode is the actual Game, and Lunatic/Maddening ranges from Hard Mode to Nightmare Mode
Wait people think 3 houses maddening mode was hard? It’s way easier than Engage Maddening.
rather than the difficulty, more in terms of maddening having same turn reinforcements and other rubbish
@@Speedwinghere
I never had problems with it, but granted I only played Edelgard Maddening without New game + and New Game + made the other maddening routes extremely easy. Perhaps I just got lucky in crimson dawn. maybe I should do Golden Deer or Blue Lion without new game +.
Yeah new game + makes it far easier
@
Ok I’ve gotten pretty far into a Golden Deer run, even decided not to rely on avoid tanking and not using the DLC… i didn’t realize how much easier Edelgard made the game.
Gotta disagree on juggernaut not being fun. Robin being built up from zero to hero was extremely fun in awakening. Honestly what I wish we could get in awakening and fates was the renown rewards being given immediately to give some extra weapons or bonuses for less skilled players could play the hardest difficulty with some help.
Engage I don't like the level sliders. Ruins the experience for me. Wish it could be toggled. Same with the dlc needing to be best each time. Small differences in how each game does things can go a long way.
Juggernauting can be fun. But when it’s by far the easiest option it’s not. Awakening Lunatic strongly punishes you for using multiple units. If I spend dozens of hours investing in 3-5 units, they shouldn’t fall off just because they aren’t a sorcerer with Nosferatu.
Engage has a similar problem just to a lesser extent, I find juggernauting with Lyn funny, but it should not make the game easier. And my units that I’ve invested in though out the entire game should be dealing more damage than 5 per attack in the late game.
@@princestarfy4098 engage punishes too much on level sliders connecting them with the MC's level and overall army. Wish that was removed as grind isn't an option it's just bullying if you wanted to do the dlc and bonus maps apart from main game.
Awakening later units don't have much of a use. Game giving you the renown rewards early would probably do better overall to build up your army. But juggernaut play is basically most of the games as engage yunaka can just dodge crit. Seth in sacred stones. Sigurd can solo being a main lord jagen and so on.
@@ivanbluecool
My Louis, Zelkov, Panette and Marrin were extremely useful thoughout the game then all of a sudden around the boat map they became practically useless. I switched to avoid tanking with Alear Wolf knight with Lyn and I found it funny, but way easier and way less satisfying.
Awakening I wanted to do Lunatic without Sorcerers and save sorcerer Robin for Lunaitc +, I got to Walhart and my Stahlt sword master and my sniper Virion, and even my Fredrick became useless. Only Robin and Chrom could deal any meaningful damage.
I enjoy juggernauting but these are not fun versions of difficultly. I beat most of Conquest lunatic with only maids as a meme run. Only getting stuck on Iago’s stupid rod spamming map. If I try to use Jade in Engage Maddening I loose. She is unusable in maddening. This is not fun levels of difficulty. This is limiting viable options to an extreme.
You make great points but I don't have Engage to play so I'll continue to spread misinformation and gratuitous hate
That's alright, that's most engage discussions anyway
If you picked any difficulty besides Maddening then you didn't beat the game.
Awful take.
@@ITNODoveI mean depends how you look at it. If there is a whole other part of a game that a player hasn't touched yet, did they really beat it? On the flipside, what about unlockable difficulties or new game plus'? Doesn't it count as beating the game if I have to get to the end of the game to unlock them?
@Jack Jo I feel like as long as you got to the end and saw the credits, you beat the game.
Difficulties, optional content, new game plus, all those sorts of things are great to have, but I wouldn't say they're necessary to say you won.
I agree. I tried an iron man on hard and gave up on chapter 14 just because Anna was too good. I was just killing everything. Then I played maddening and lost my iron man on chapter 20
Wait, Engage Hard mode is too easy? Maddening difficulty is like sticking your hand in an ant mound to prove your tough.
Is that an Archer Panette?
Mission: Remove Wasp Nest.
Normal- Call the exterminator
Hard- A can of Raid and a stick.
Maddening- Barehanded, broad daylight, no assistance
Now you see, Engage itself is just mid. Playing hard or maddening doesn't make a game better in this case. I rest my case.
(Mostly a joke, I hate this game, but won't same people who like aspects of this game, only if its their favorite for gameplay and story (espically that part) reasons.)
At 0:30 - Funny Zappy Moment XD
Lunatic better than Maddening