Ranting about Hard vs Maddening in Fire emblem Engage

No I am not gatekeeping, play whatever you enjoy and is suited to your skill level. Yes I am pointing out the large differences between the two difficulties in fire emblem engage.

#fireemblem #fireemblemengage

[oof]

Sounds like Cope, i lost all my units in awakening Normal and my wife left me.

[justinianga]

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.

[FireEmbros]

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.

[fseifgwevgwef]

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

[Z_OFA]

On maddening there are a total of 4 skirmishes. One after ch11. Two more after ch17. And the last one appears after ch22.

[Jyuratodus_Enjoyer]

Bruh, I take like 30-40 minutes on each map on Engage hard mode, it hurts my soul hearing everyone call it easy ;_;

[juicyjuustar]

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.

[kag]

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

[MidwestArtMan]

Speedwing calls me a baby in his thumbnail 😢
I've never actually played an difficulty (lunatic/maniac/maddening) because I like using goofy units like Flashing Fist Framme and General Lapis.

[Pmm_Dia]

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.

[princestarfy]

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.

[TotalEdelgardFan]

I don't have Engage, but I will consider playing Maddening in my imagination since I can't afford the game. Thanks, Speedwinghere.

[Abundy]

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.

[vicu]

Me who used Yunaka on Ike to clear the whole map (on maddening) 🔪😜

[AstraProc]

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.

[StoryboardsbyStuffPOP]

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.

[jerry]

i'm so glad i played maddening on my first playthrough, i definitely would not have had fun on hard mode lol

[DoggyP]

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.

[SuperZez]

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.

[Kimo-Cyrus]

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