Sign the Wall if you're an Otaku and proud of it!

Sign the OU Wall!

Fire Emblem Tips

I've been hearing about the new Fire Emblem: Awakening, so I've been replaying my old Fire Emblems to sort of get myself psyched up for it.  I've been playing Fire Emblem since the original game on GBA, so as a veteran I was thinking of sharing some tips for anyone new to the series.

First off, it's best to approach the game with a "quality not quantity" mindset.  Believe me it's much better to have a small army of elite warriors than a large army of weaklings.  It's generally best to go by weapon type.  One person who will specialize in nothing but swords, one person who will specialize in nothing but axes, one person who will specialize in nothing but lances, and so on.  Doing it this way will have your guys strong enough to beat just about anybody, assuming you're following the weapon triangle of putting your sword person only up against axe enemies and your lance person only up against sword enemies and so on.  This will also save you a lot of money since you only have one person to buy swords for and one person to buy bows for and so on.  And every time someone new joins your army, they'll be bringing you free weapons.  And don't forget all of the free weapons you'll be getting from killing the bad guys, meaning that you should rarely need to have to buy any weapons at all!  Even the bosses will be much easier to beat this way.  And speaking of bosses....

A boss that won't move and is sitting on something that is continually healing him is an experience point tree.  Send in your highest defense unit (resistance unit if boss is a magic user) with no weapons to fight back with.  This might sound like a stupid idea but it's actually genius in disguise, because what will happen is that the boss will only be doing little to no damage at all to your guy and will never stop attacking until his weapon breaks.  Once the boss no longer has a way to fight back, you can bring in all of your units to hit away at him.  But don't kill him!  Let him heal up and then attack again.  When his health gets down low again, stop attacking and let him heal up again.  Keep repeating this as long as you like and you'll have an excellent source of unlimited free experience points.  As a boss, each of your guys will be getting a huge chunk of experience for every blow they land.  And as he has no weapons, you don't even have to worry about the weapon triangle.  This is a great way to safely level up any low level units and improve your weapon levels regardless of whether or not you hit.  This is much safer than using an arena.

Admittedly though the one time the "quality not quantity" approach might be a problem is when you have a level where the bad guys are coming at you from all directions and you have to defend for a certain number of turns, because there's a chance you might not have enough guys to cover all of the directions the bad guys are coming from.  But even though that chance does exist, it has yet to ever happen to me.  Of course you would definitely want your lance guy to be guarding whichever direction all the sword guys will be coming from and your axe guy to guard whichever direction the lance guys will be coming from and so on.  But if by chance it does come up, it's best to move your army to a place that is much easier to guard from like a corner that has only one direction for the bad guys to come at you from.  Cover that one direction with your highest defense guy regardless of his weapon and let your long range guys safely pick them off from behind your defense guy.  But if you can't move your army and there isn't a place further in where you can guard better, send your guys out and away from what it is you're guarding.  The bad guys will always attack the first thing they can get to, so make sure that first thing is your guy who will be killing them.

Now that having been said, the levels will usually always start off with some bad guys coming to you.  Unless you're pressed for time for some reason, like you have to beat a thief to a chest for example, start out on the defensive.  Once they're gone you can take your time picking off the rest of the bad guys one by one.  It's best to take each battle one bad guy at a time so you can be sure to put the right person against the right bad guy in accordance to the weapon triangle.



No comments: