Fire Emblem/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Given how many characters there are across the games, this is inevitable. Particularly obvious with shipping (especially when it comes to sexual orientation), since the games rarely define specific canon pairings, and the support system often gives one character multiple potential romances.
  • Americans Hate Tingle: While the games set in Marth's world are loved in Japan, with Mystery of the Emblem being heralded as the very best, the rest of the world sees them as some of the weakest parts in the series. The fact that they get disproportionate representation as a result does them no favors.
    • In general, the series is much more popular and acclaimed in Japan than in America, where it still is somewhat popular, but the games sometimes get mixed reviews.
  • Anticlimax Boss: Quite a few. The Sacred Stones give you a bunch of weapons super effective against the final boss. A decent mage takes no damage from the Dragon (figurative, not literal) in Shadow Dragon, and you merely need a special spell to bypass his damage immunity; depending on how much you've used Marth, the final boss himself is either easy or stupidly easy: the good Falchion can often take him out down in two hits (if Marth's not doing so well, Tiki or Nagi, as well as someone using Parthia or Gradivus, will work wonders). Then there's The Sword of Seals, where you have nine weapons that are super-effective against every enemy in the final two levels the titular weapon, which destroys all in its path.
    • Mention must be made of Veld in Thracia 776, who's well known as the easiest Final Boss in the series, wielding a heavy, long-range only Dark Tome alongside the more basic Yatsmungand as a back up weapon, and having rather mediocre stats. With no ability to defend himself up close and a laughable attack speed of 0 on the first turn he is out, he'll go down in one round if you throw anyone worth using at him. In fact, it's even possible to capture him without taking any damage!
    • And if you use Yuria and her Naga tome, like the game tells you to, Yurius in Genealogy becomes this. If she's dead, however, he's That One Boss... go figure.
    • Ashnard in Path of Radiance doesn't revive with the power of Lehran's Medallion unless you fight him on hard mode. Not playing on hard also has your Requested Laguz Royal join at the beginning of the final stage (instead of appearing after Ashnard's resurrection,) making the final stage a cakewalk on Easy or Normal.
    • There are countless stories of people beating the Dragon in Blazing Sword by equipping Canas or Athos with Luna.
  • Anvilicious: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn's "racism is bad, mmkay?". Aesop can be pretty annoying, especially since nothing new is really done with it.
  • Broken Base: Shadow Dragon caused (and still causes) a lot of drama among the fans. It was highly anticipated by Western fans, who were excited to finally get one of Marth's games and avert the No Export for You nature of the first installment of the franchise. When the game released, however, it was considered a rather lackluster remake, as aside from a contested graphical update and a few nice new features, the game lacked a number of systems that are now considered core mechanics: such as the Support system, the Rescue system, or even allowing any unit to visit a village (only Marth can do so). However, others like the game for its simplified approach, a large difficulty selection, Purple Prose localization, and being a largely faithful remake of Marth's story. It also properly introduced the Reclassing feature, which is divisive by itself.
  • Character Tiers: Debates over this encompass a big part of the fandom.
  • Cliché Storm: The games go in and out of this: The Akaneia games certainly seem this way after more modern installments, but these games are products of the dawn of video game storytelling in the early 90's. The plot of The Binding Blade is certainly rather old hat (playing many tropes used in the first game almost identically), and Sacred Stones, outside of its interesting and three-dimensional antagonist, is also following well-trod ground. Awakening is also rather cliche, though it has the excuse of being the series' Milestone Celebration and attempting to incorporate a sort of "Greatest Hits" feeling throughout. The rest of the series is much-less similar, or at least does a better job of playing with the tropes it utilizes.
  • Cult Classic: In Japan though, the series has been mainstream since the NES days. Outside of Japan, the people who actually have bought the pre-Awakening Fire Emblem games and played it are reduced to a (very loyal) cult. Still to this day, people are still arguing over a tier list in Fire Emblem 9 and Fire Emblem 10.
  • Demonic Spider: The Dark Magi with their "reduce to 1 HP" spell in the Genealogy of Holy War. Despite the low accuracy, it still seems to hit you very often for some reason.
    • Played totally straight in Sacred Stones with the Bael and Elder Bael enemies. Actual giant, demonic spiders that also fit the trope... as they hit hard, fast, can poison, have a respectable chunk of health and defense, and nearly always spawn on mountain tiles and/or in fog.
  • Die for Our Ship: Has its own page.
  • Discredited Meme: Many people blame the downfall of the "BEGONE THOT" meme on the overuse of it in the Fire Emblem fandom, especially towards either Fanservicey characters like Camilla, or Yandere characters like Faye.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Fan Dumb: Visit any forum for the series, and you will see this everywhere, especially in tier threads.
  • Fan Hater: Because of the borderline-nonexistent tolerance for differing opinions, the fandom has begun to grow a sizable hatedom.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Anything regarding sacrificing allies in Shadow Dragon. Surprisingly, Shadow Dragon's version of Marth is considered to be very well written and has its fair share of fans.
    • The mechanics that caused this actually verge on Canon Discontinuity in New Mystery of the Emblem. Namely, all characters from Shadow Dragon (even the sacrifice) appear alive and well, and Marth recognizes them all. An outcome like this would be impossible to achieve in Shadow Dragon, as meeting the sidequest characters requires most of the other characters to be dead.
  • Game Breaker: Certain units can become this with the right development. Now has its own page.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Westerners tend to prefer Holy War (mainly pre-export fans who enjoy the complexity), The Blazing Blade (being the first Fire Emblem game outside of Japan with excellent localization and production values), or even The Sacred Stones (strategy fans "spoiled" by the genre's more popular offerings who like the open-world map and lowered difficulty).
  • Goddamned Bats: Enemy magic users with Sleep or Berserk staves. Especially in Genealogy of the Holy War, where enemy-exclusive Sleep staves had near-perfect accuracy and unlimited uses, and in Thracia 776, where the staves had infinite range and the status effects never wore off on their own.
  • Goddamned Boss: Any static boss with decent power, doubly so if they're sitting on a throne which gives substantial bonuses to their defense and evasion.
  • Good Bad Bugs: The enemy control glitches, which have Game-Breaker potential (but are not Game Breaking Bugs).
    • Radiant Dawn's "fix" of the bonus XP system from Path of Radiance actually made the system more broken. While Path of Radiance was merely Save Scummable, Radiant Dawn guarantees 3 (though only 3) stat gains per level up, even if all the stats most likely to grow are maxed. Consequently, characters with unbalanced growths (weak but speedy Vika, slow but sturdy Aran or powerful but fragile Soren, for example) can use BEXP once they cap their good stats to improve their bad ones.
    • The pitfall traps in Chapter 3-11 of Radiant Dawn only activate if a non-flying unit moves onto the space, and one of the enemy bishops in that chapter has a Rescue staff. This can allow a unit to end up on one of the pitfall spaces without setting it off (yes, normally the enemies avoid those spaces, which makes it easy to see which spaces are and are not booby-trapped). However, because the space is already occupied without the pitfall trap having been set off, a unit with Pass can move through that space without falling into a pit.
  • Ho Yay: See here.
  • Hype Backlash: A strange example of this combined with Seinfeld Is Unfunny hit with Shadow Dragon. If you ask most people outside of Japan what their first Fire Emblem game was, most of them will say "The Blazing Blade". In between receiving Shadow Dragon, we also received Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones and Fire Emblem Tellius... so a lot of people were expecting Marth's game to be like what we expected a Fire Emblem game to be. When Shadow Dragon was a "back to basics" remake of the first game, a lot of people expressed disappointment because twenty-odd years of innovation had taken place in the meantime, and the game was showing its age.
  • Internet Backdraft: Awakening caused a big Newbie Boom. Between being a very controversial title with large changes to the formula and storytelling, and being very popular overseas, it created a lot of tension. Mentioning that you're a Fire Emblem fan who came into the series with Awakening and only play it and Fates, is thus an excellent way to kick up a firestorm between newer and older players.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Some fans circa Awakening were attracted to the series due to the ability to marry your Player Character to any of the many attractive characters in the game. However, as noted above, many veteran fans tend to be accusatory about this issue, claiming that it is the only reason the series had such a big Newbie Boom and that it has attracted players who play for the "wrong" reasons.
  • Memetic Mutation: Is Marth or Roy in this game?
  • Moral Event Horizon: Torabant, it sure is brave of you to use a 3-year-old girl's life in blackmailing an already heavily disadvantaged army into surrendering its only hope of surviving the massacre you're trying to deal to it.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: "Battle Preparations" in The Blazing Sword. You've just decided to assault the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, Hector has just learned that his brother has died... and then without warning, an unexpected lesson in economics and trade. "[...] as Marquess Ostia, he gave a scathing indictment of the peer system." -- What?
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The concept of promotion can prove quite uneven: the gap in promotable classes between Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light clearly expresses just one example.
    • Weapon weight, which reduces a unit's attack speed, has proven a thorny issue to address throughout the series. There have been four different ways to deal with it, each with a logical reason behind it, and each one unbalanced in favor of certain classes and builds:
      • "No Buffer" (attack speed decreases by full weight): favors sword users and archers whose lighter weapons allow for better speed retention. Rationale: any weapon can weigh anyone down.
      • "Build/Constitution" (unit slows if weight exceeds build/con): favors bulky units with at least decent speed, allowing them to outrun normally faster, yet terribly burdened light units. Rationale: bulkier warriors can handle weight better.
      • "Strength" (same as above, only with strength): favors fast units with the strength to keep all their speed. Rationale: the stronger a unit becomes, the more weight they could handle.
      • "No Weight" (weapons have no weight whatsoever): favors all fast units, especially those with issues over the two prior methods. Rationale: a properly trained warrior should never be burdened with their weapon.
    • Healing staves can (and frustratingly do) miss in Fire Emblem 5, as it's based on a Skill calculation. While status staves in this game have a ridiculously high hit rate and can hit from practically anywhere on the map, a healer can miss while standing next to the unit he/she tries to heal. All the additions in Fire Emblem 5 counts.
    • Biorhythm from Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. Chances are, no matter whether your units are feeling good or not, you will either want to use a certain unit in a certain place, or that unit is the only one who is suited for the area. If you are feeling good and the enemies aren't, good for you. But... if you're feeling down and the enemies just so happen to be in good or even great condition, better hope your unit has enough health/defenses to weather their attacks. If you like using the Myrmidon or Pegasus Knight type of unit, then this will hit you hard.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Akaenia was the series that was the Trope Codifier for this series, as well as the entire genre (along with Shining Force and some games like Nintendo Wars). Most of the complaints for Shadow Dragon are pretty much this.
  • Shipping: With the concept of supports in the later games, excluding remakes, the many different endings that come with A level support between two characters and the stat bonuses characters receive if they have A level supports and are next to each other, the game is actually encouraging characters to be shipped!
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat: Every single game. Example: In The Blazing Sword, the Lyn x Hector vs Eliwood vs Kent vs Rath vs Florina + whatever else comes to mind. And please, for the love of peace on the internet, do not bring up Roy's heritage...
    • If she's supported with Sain, Serra lampshades this at Lyn's expense.
    • And of course, theres the legendary Finn - Beowulf - Lachesis triangle.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks/It's the Same, Now It Sucks: Shadow Dragon is not well liked by fans because it is very close to the original (which fans tend to acknowledge as lacking) with only some of the improvements made in latter titles (meaning that most of the features were "removed").
    • In New Mystery of the Emblem, a lot of fans were bothered by the announcement of the addition of a "Casual" mode option (removing the series' signature permanent death). Fans turned to "meh" after the actual release proved Lunatic is moonstruck hard enough to ease the fears it would be the first sign in dumbing down the series.
  • Tier-Induced Scrappy: Many characters with perfectly-good personalities and backstories get flak from the more gamist members of the community when they have poor classes, stats or scaling. Conversely, some bland, or even unpleasant characters get away with it by being very useful in gameplay.
    • Archers are a consistently hated class since even though they can attack from two squares away, they can only attack from two squares away. Fine, but most enemies in the game attack from one square away, and later in the games, they tend to have weapons that allow them to attack from 1-2 squares away, leaving them defenseless on the turn they are attacked. Adding to this, Archers generally have low defense, and since the enemy AI tends to pick the unit it can do the most damage to, the archer is generally cannon fodder for the enemy to pick off. The only real niche they could fill is that they can take out wyvern and pegasus riders, but even that is rendered null because Mages can do that too and attack from 1-2 squares away. It should be noted that this also resulted in Archers getting MUCH less exp compared to other classes, which is taken further with Archer's generally lacking base stats. It didn't help that the older games and their DS remakes gave archers some of the lowest mobility in the game either. To be fair though, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn gave archers crossbows that allows them to attack one space and when promoted to marksmen, they could attack from three spaces making them Game Breakers in this particular game. Fire Emblem: Fates buffed them by including bows into the Weapon Triangle to give them more things to counter, increasing bows' Might and introducing a skill that allows them to attack at minimum range.
    • Knights also get a fair amount of flak, though not as much as Archers. Unlike Archers, they do have a specific niche to fill as the party's tank, and tend to start with decent stats. Unfortunately, their low move severely hinders their usefulness: either the party has to move more slowly so the Knight can stay in the front and tank, or the Knight gets left behind. Their low Speed is also a problem, as most enemies later in the game will be able to double them (ironically, this can make Knight units worse at tanking than other units as, say, taking 8 hits twice deals more damage than one 12 hit). They can shine on maps where the party mostly has to stay still and defend a specific area, but there don't tend to be too many of those (and some games don't have any). Combine that with the fact that there are a number of weapons that are effective against them, that their generally low Resistance makes them vulnerable to mages, and that there tend to be many other, faster and more mobile units that can fill a frontline tanking role, and you have a class that tends to get left in the dust. Both Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and Fire Emblem: Fates buffed the class, likely in response.
    • Est units, while typically popular among fans, tend to be ranked low on tier lists. In theory, with their higher than average growth rates, Est units should become your strongest units when given enough training. In practice, their typically terrible base stats combined with their late joining time make training them to competency a complete chore and a bad investment compared to a regular unit. Contrast this the Jagen Archetypes, units that start out prepromoted with high base stats but with terrible exp gain and low growths. In almost every Fire Emblem game, the Jagens can ride off their base stats until they drop off mid game (in which case then the hardest part of the game is already over) or in some cases never drop off at all and break the game over their knees (Seth, Titania and Fire Emblem 7 Marcus).
  • What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: A lot of characters are named after mythological figures, and while there are a few examples where they make sense, there's clearly some thrown in just for the hell of it. Please don't dig too deeply into why a guy would name his wyvern after the Greek God of Sun.
  • Woolseyism: The names of pretty much everything and everyone are changed in localization, which usually works well. Some are questionable (Celice becomes Seliph), but they work really well for the most part. The English writing is exceptional too: there's a huge gap in quality between the various fan translations and the official stuff.
Back to Fire Emblem
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Fire_Emblem/YMMV?oldid=1903729"