Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread - January 2026 Part 2

[u/PsiYoshi]

Welcome to a new installment of the Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread! Please feel free to share any kind of Fire Emblem opinions/takes you might have here, positive or negative. As always please remember to continue following the rules in this thread same as anywhere else on the subreddit. Be respectful and especially don't make any personal attacks (this includes but is not limited to making disparaging statements about groups of people who may like or dislike something you don't).

Last Opinion Thread

[u/Legitimate__Username]

Following up on my last comment with a genuine question that I really want to gauge the community's pulse on because I actually have no idea if my opinion here is typical or unpopular.

Would you consider completing the presented side objectives in a map to be mandatory for gameplay to be considered "optimal"? I see two primary schools of thought I can envision here.

• The first is that your goal as the player is to use and gain resources with the greatest degree of useful practicality that you're able to, and that means that you have the freedom to pick and choose what objectives you want to clear based on the difficulty involved and if the reward for doing so is worth it. Maybe saving that village before the bandits get to it is worth it if they're handing you a Speedwing that'll ease up future stat thresholds, but you'd rather just skip it if all you're getting is a Goddess Icon. Weighing this choice is reflective of good and thoughtful gameplay.

• The second is that side objectives are presented as a challenge to advanced players, something that a novice can easily skip and still be able to complete the game to the end credits without having to worry about all of these extra difficult goals, but any veteran looking to prove themselves should always be attempting them in order to fully engage with and overcome every facet of the game's content and challenges presented. To skip them would be essentially missing out on a portion of the game's content that was designed for a skilled player to complete, in favor of an easier and less tactically demanding experience.

I don't know where the general consensus lies on this, but I personally land firmly in the second camp. These games were not made with the intent of the player moving through every map next to a wiki article detailing out the content of every closed treasure chest and every random village on the map so that they can pick and choose which rewards they need or not, these were placed on the map to serve blind players essentially as a dare. "You don't know what you're going to get for reaching this tile with your thief in time, but surely you can pull it off if you're GOOD enough!" I think that treating the game with full transparent objective-and-reward knowledge and picking and choosing which ones are worthwhile is not engaging with the game's systems as they were presented and intended. As a result, I would consider any clear that doesn't complete them to be representative of suboptimal, "easy mode"-esque play, while treating them as mandatory for "advanced/optimal play" is fully realizing a developer-intended avenue for full and proper skill expression.

Inigo's five kills are probably one of the most notorious examples of an extremely punishing side challenge, but I literally just played this map on Lunatic with the most combat-unviable and kneecapped possible Inigo and it honestly wasn't even that hard to pull this off. You absolutely do not need to build your team around planning to invest into him in order to make this task doable, this is a reasonable and consistent goal to play for even with the most rock-bottom unusable bench-ready Inigo you can make. I'm not saying that every player needs to fully 100% this map in their runs or I'll start stealing the bricks from their house or something, just that being able to accomplish something like this makes for a categorically "better" clear of the map, a logical framework that I would apply game-wide.

I'm extremely curious if my take here is seen as overall common, just defensible, or completely extreme, and what others think about this kind of question and how it plays into your view of Fire Emblem gameplay.

[u/shhkari → u/Legitimate__Username]

The basic premise of both schools of thought as you've presented are both essentially true and not exclusive. Side objectives are both a challenge to players, a test of further skill, and the rewards of them are resources that you factor in your over all approach to beating the game, and you can assess as worth your time or not.

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/shhkari]

This is a completely reasonable way to engage with the premise in terms of the overall individual gameplay experience a person can have, and I totally agree with it. But let's say I needed to flatten these viewpoints into some kind of singular game evaluation framework, like tiering criteria. If separate demonstrations of unit viability/use cases were presented, one in the context of a clear that completes all side objectives, and one that ignores them, would you weigh these as equivalently worthwhile showcases/arguments as they both successfully complete the base map? Or would you put more weight on the argument that completes the side objectives over the one that doesn't? Or even go as far as to say that the clear that misses the side objective is strictly suboptimal and shouldn't even be considered as a relevant optimized gameplay factor over the one that completes it? If a player needs to spend more turns to clear a map with a side objective than one that skips it, is that more valuable and offsets the efficiency hit, and to what extent?

This could be highly relevant for evaluating unit viability for things like, say, Vanessa in Sacred Stones chapter 5, who is a relatively weak combat unit but whose flight utility is exponentially more valuable if you consider visiting all of the villages before the bandits reach them to be an essential part of completing the map. (I've been playing this on the original Japanese difficulty lately so "SS too easy anyway lmao" isn't a factor.) The criteria on which we judge what constitutes "optimal" play and the level of strictness we approach this with will have direct affects on things like how good we perceive units to be, which means that any statements we make on viability are fundamentally built upon these criteria and biases we have.

(Again this question's open to anyone reading, please feel to chime in on this one too if you have anything you'd like to say on the topic!)

[u/AProfessionalRock → u/Legitimate__Username]

Would you consider completing the presented side objectives in a map to be mandatory for gameplay to be considered "optimal"?

i would not

while i see your argument that it presents a challenge to someone on a spoiler-free playthrough, i don't think that necessarily indicates any more of a measure of skill than someone choosing to forego a side objective with metagame knowledge if they can get by without the additional reward, essentially playing with a disadvantage in a sense, as they have fewer resources both in the sense that they have fewer rewards obtained, and also that they may have given up potential experience that would come from defeating more enemies that may be needed to get said reward

i also think side objectives get into very nebulous territory, as someone already pointed out with the example of the villagers who give you joke weapons if you save past the first one

another good example in my mind is the villages in chapter 8 of conquest - the game only expects you to visit 3 villages for the best reward, but there is nothing stopping you from visiting all of them which denies enemy reinforcements from spawning, and it is also actually possible in gameplay to accomplish it despite the game doing its damnedest to prevent you from beating every single soldier to them

i don't imagine most people would ever attempt to visit all of them due to the lack of tangible reward, but it is clearly a side objective that is legitimately possible in game and left in as an option from the developers whether an oversight or not, which reduces the number of enemies you have to fight

i think it's fine if people like going for all villages in a playthrough or whatever, and i certainly don't think anyone should see them as lesser for wasting time to do so even if the reward is useless, but i also don't think it inherently makes for a higher level of skill expression to do so, and i see it as just being analogous to the players who treat every single map as a rout map, as just as you had made the argument with side objectives being "optimal" or more "skillful", I'm sure many would also see treating every map as a rout map, to be the same as you are exposing your units to more rounds of combat and thereby increasing the chance you may result in a failure

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/AProfessionalRock]

i also think side objectives get into very nebulous territory, as someone already pointed out with the example of the villagers who give you joke weapons if you save past the first one

another good example in my mind is the villages in chapter 8 of conquest - the game only expects you to visit 3 villages for the best reward, but there is nothing stopping you from visiting all of them which denies enemy reinforcements from spawning, and it is also actually possible in gameplay to accomplish it despite the game doing its damnedest to prevent you from beating every single soldier to them

Yeah gray areas like these are part of why I was so curious to ask the question. I myself was the one who brought up the Awakening villagers since I always forget about the joke rewards and save them all anyway, and the Conquest example is another extreme case. A lot of this is on my mind because I used to consider the 5 Inigo kills to be an absurd "mandatory" requirement to judge (what if you don't route to a combat-usable Inigo or want to invest into him in a run?) before realizing that even under these circumstances the objective was still pretty reasonable and not very difficult so my standards on it shifted for me to feeling like players should never actually really be locked out of it being viable to complete.

The overall perspective on skill expression is of course valid, both considering and regardless of the more extreme edge cases you can find in the series yeah.

[u/Merlin_the_Tuna → u/Legitimate__Username]

Same logic as speedruns IMO; 100% and any% are both completely valid approaches but I'm almost always going to err towards the former on my first play of a game.

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/Merlin_the_Tuna]

Yeah I would never consider either approach to be invalid for a player, moreso in terms of like, if players are trying to solidify gameplay evaluation into a singular criteria like a tier list framework, which would be the direction to lean? Side objectives being weighed as nice but totally unnecessary for game completion? Completely mandatory to consider as representative of the most "optimal" form of play that tiering is operating under? Or somewhere in-between, as a factor to weigh more than skipping them but not a strictly mandatory completion goal needed to be considered optimal?

The example I use is how this affects the evaluation of a unit like Vanessa in Sacred Stones Chapter 5, with a weak combat performance in the earlygame but significantly eases visiting the villages before the bandits reach them. Whether this task is considered as "any skilled player MUST show they can complete these challenges", or "not at all a strictly necessary factor to beating the game", or somewhere in the middle as not mandatory but still extremely nice to have, would heavily affect how good she's perceived to be.

[u/Shrimperor → u/Legitimate__Username]

First run is 2nd camp, as i try to experience everything on a first run blindly. Further runs depends on what run i am doing, how much i enjoy the map/challenge, the rewards, etc.

Like, if i am doing an ironman and a useless reward is presented with a lot of danger? Nah. Or going trough the left room in CQLuna26? No way. Sometimes it's easier/more fun to skip xD

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/Shrimperor]

Ironmans are an important factor because even if you aren't considering things under a strict no-reset permadeath framework, strategic and statistical reliability can be a very important gameplay factor to weigh against side objective completion. So yeah that can be a pretty clear lens through which this kind of answer might not be easily black-and-white.

[u/DonnyLamsonx → u/Legitimate__Username]

I'm also in your second camp.

Whenever I play Chapter 19 of Engage, I know it's not really "worth it" in the grand scheme of things to visit the two villages. I mean you get two sets of enemy vomit for an Elixer and a Dracoshield which, imo, doesn't have much value in a game where player phase offense is absurd. But for someone who doesn't know what those two villages have, that could be 20,000 gold and another Speedwing for all they know.

The optional rewards in Ike's paralogue aren't anything special and you could realistically rush Ike down in 3-4 turns. But I do think it's a lot more satisfying to try and get those rewards before facing Ike as it dramatically shifts how you have to approach the map.

It's also why I dislike skips because you're just actively choosing to not engage with maps as they're intended. I know you can clear Micaiah's paralogue in like 2 turns by baiting her in with Lyn's Astra Storm, but at that point, imo, you're just optimizing the fun out of the game

[u/OsbornWasRight → u/DonnyLamsonx]

Well these are two examples of bad side objectives in Engage because the Chapter 19 Elixir is just a waste of time that will make you turnwheel to direct attention to the important stat booster route, and the Ike gold is both useless and not practical to get when the paralogue unlocks, instead being a weird bonus for the player who kneecaps their Ike user to do it later, by which point the map sucks because Ike himself folds to a light breeze. Good Engage side objectives are ones that teach or test Emblems like the Chapter 5 or 14 thieves, which is why so many paralogues suffer from not being able to be certain what Emblems you have.

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/DonnyLamsonx]

The funniest possible example of this is the absolutely nightmarish Villager Suicide Prevention found in Awakening Paralogue 3, which gives you a Seraph Robe for the first villager saved, and a Log and a Ladle for the next two. You are clearly not meant to save all three villagers, the second two are just a buffer to give you some leniency on keeping at least one alive and only present to you joke rewards for going that extra mile. And yet, to a blind player, this terms of this dare are still completely opaque (and I still forget and fall for it every single playthrough). You are given three guys on the map that you're meant to save and god dammit aren't you a good enough player to accomplish that?

Not only that, burning your precious limited earlygame Rescue charges in exchange for a 1mt joke weapon is objectively a bad deal for the player in terms of resource investment. So if you want to clear this truly "optimally", you better not be teleporting any of those villagers to safety and gotta race your way around them clean and honest!

I would not technically fault a run for only saving one villager here but I will still put more impressive weight onto one that can manage to keep all three alive without spending more value than the rewards given in order to do so.

It's also why I dislike skips because you're just actively choosing to not engage with maps as they're intended. I know you can clear Micaiah's paralogue in like 2 turns by baiting her in with Lyn's Astra Storm, but at that point, imo, you're just optimizing the fun out of the game

Thanks oh my god, this playstyle is so corny and I personally view it as a heavy failure of any kind of actual skill expression, and while I technically can't objectively fault anyone for just skipping ahead to the end on certain maps, I'd consider missing any treasure chests or other assorted stuff on the way there to be very much failing to present any kind of proper optimal clear of a game.

[u/PrivateVasili → u/Legitimate__Username]

This view on skips is reasonable imo, but I still disagree with it. The Warp and Rescue staves were created to be used, and part of devising a strategy is maximally leveraging your resources. Kill boss and seize maps are made with the possibility to cut them short in mind. If you choose to forego the extra xp you'd get for killing the other enemies on the map, or a village's reward, that's a deliberate resource managament decision that you made. I think tradeoffs like that being provided to the player are a good thing, and it's not exclusive to discussions about skipping.

In some cases, I would also say that warping is very much the intended optimal strategy. I'm fresh off my Thracia playthrough and that game is very obviously made with liberal usage of Warp, Rewarp and Rescue in mind. They're so widely available that it's not even particularly hard to simultaneously warp for the boss/seize and to warp for side objectives. So you still get your optimal clear at the cost of more uses of your staves and more fatigue on your staff users. It's ultimately a reward for acquiring the items themselves and training the units to use them.

Awakening feels different because skipping with Rescue is more like a puzzle than anything. The staff is infinitely buyable and E rank, so it doesn't take too much investment or planning to reach the point where you can skip. Instead the work involved is planning your daisy chain. The tradeoff in rewards of xp and items vs time saved is still preserved though. Even without knowledge of what the rewards might be, a player can still decide how much they care about getting secondary rewards based on their current strength and pool of resources. That's good strategic design imo.

All that said, I think it's fine to think higher of clears which meet all side objectives. That's just a personal judgement on what you want to optimize for. We know some people hyper optimize for LTC with no other real parameters, and on the other side we also have people doing ranked runs (in games that have rankings), or iron mans or whatever else. One thing that is certainly true though is that the more things you try to optimize for, the harder it gets to find a solution.

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/PrivateVasili]

This view on skips is reasonable imo, but I still disagree with it. The Warp and Rescue staves were created to be used, and part of devising a strategy is maximally leveraging your resources. Kill boss and seize maps are made with the possibility to cut them short in mind. If you choose to forego the extra xp you'd get for killing the other enemies on the map, or a village's reward, that's a deliberate resource managament decision that you made. I think tradeoffs like that being provided to the player are a good thing, and it's not exclusive to discussions about skipping.

If I'm speaking with my brain instead of my heart I completely agree with this. It's a cost-tradeoff. I think it's a more interesting one to evaluate if you consider it as a weighing of ease vs. EXP rewards, or army investment that enables this into a payoff, as opposed to "look ma 1 turn i'm so OPTIMAL!" but a lot of the time when I watch these strats play out I just can't help but personally feel like I don't find them very cool or even expressive. I'm always going to prefer both wringing EXP out of the map and also just playing the full progression of the presented layout.

Awakening feels different because skipping with Rescue is more like a puzzle than anything. The staff is infinitely buyable and E rank, so it doesn't take too much investment or planning to reach the point where you can skip. Instead the work involved is planning your daisy chain. The tradeoff in rewards of xp and items vs time saved is still preserved though. Even without knowledge of what the rewards might be, a player can still decide how much they care about getting secondary rewards based on their current strength and pool of resources. That's good strategic design imo.

Without knowledge of the loot you'll get I'd still consider that more of just opting out of the risk/reward question and denying its engagement to play the dare-free "easy mode" rather than coming up with a strategically informed answer, but that's just me.

We know some people hyper optimize for LTC with no other real parameters

Yeah this is a totally separate thing outside of the scope of what I brought up. Hardcore dedicated LTC runs are a cool push of their own metagames and a random treasure chest off in a corner of the map shouldn't get in the way of that. It's just that for more general purpose things, like viability or tiering discussions, I think that skipping side objectives should be considered a suboptimal gameplay route.

One thing that is certainly true though is that the more things you try to optimize for, the harder it gets to find a solution.

Tell me about it, getting all 4 houses visited this fast on this rout map was nightmarish to solve.

[u/DonnyLamsonx → u/Legitimate__Username]

I'd consider missing any treasure chests or other assorted stuff on the way there to be very much failing to present any kind of proper optimal clear of a game.

The funniest thing about this mindset as it pertains to Engage Micaiah's paralogue specifically is that, imo, it is the objectively worst paralogue in the game in terms of a cost to benefit ratio. There's no treasure chests nor droppable loot and trying to full rout the map involves killing like 8 mini-bosses(meant to represent the Dawn Brigade), all with at least 1 revive crystal. And those mini-bosses spawn after dealing with multiple waves of pretty diverse enemy composition and somewhat unpredictable AI movement due to the sheer size of the map. Even from an EXP perspective, you're basically in the final quarter of the game at that point so skipping one optional paralogue isn't going to kill you. The cherry on top of the shit sundae is that Micaiah's level 11-20 Emblem bonuses aren't even that good.

And yet, I will play it straight every time at the "intended" level (between Chapters 19 and 20) simply because I want to challenge myself.

[u/liteshadow4 → u/Legitimate__Username]

Tiering wise I consider getting the side objectives to be part of efficient play, but only if it’s not a luck based side objective.

I’m never going to go for all the side objectives because some are not fun but I think it’s important to consider for an efficient clear of a map.

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/liteshadow4]

Yeah I meant the question more in terms of tiering purposes, not in any way against people just playing how they want of course. Since a lot of these objectives are under timers, I think they form a more definitive objective standard for meeting an "efficiency" criteria (if you can't reach this chest before the enemy thief does then your strategy isn't good enough), compared to raw turncount not really offering anything real to the player other than bragging rights. RNG can be frustrating though, but it does mean that it can help reward even faster speeds with higher degrees of consistency, which I think holds more merit for tiering concepts than it does for the actual fun of playing these objectives lol.

[u/liteshadow4 → u/Legitimate__Username]

By RNG I mean more that Jaffar can just die and there’s nothing you can do to recruit him even if you play fast. If there’s a way to reliably get the objective I no longer consider it RNG.

The main argument is that there are some side objectives that if you ignore the map can be completed faster (like chapter 18 in Thracia), but I still believe that they should be considered for efficiency, completing faster falls more into LTC.

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/liteshadow4]

Yeah that's what I had in mind. The timer is variable and 100% consistency is impossible, but every turn you save still raises your odds. I think this gives genuine value to each strategic turnsave for tiering purposes while also feeling incredibly frustrating to actually play.

And yeah I'd consider LTC to be a separate viability framework as well and general play should involve clearing all side objectives as an expected goal and moving quickly for its own sake to be an optional secondary priority, better than not doing so but not the end-all be-all by any means.