The Fire Emblem series is often viewed as daunting to newcomers, and has garnered a reputation as being unforgiving and difficult due to the game's "perma-death" mechanic. However, each game in the series provides players numerous tools to help them through each respective entry, with more recent titles featuring more and more features to help ease in new players.
However, a great deal of the series perceived difficulties comes in the form of repeated mistakes by players that may be hindering their progress. So today, we're going to discuss the ten most common mistakes made by Fire Emblem players and how to avoid them!
10 Too Many Swords
Three of the most common weapon types across the Fire Emblem series are swords, lances, and axes. In many entries in the series, these three weapons for the "weapon triangle," with swords being strong against axes, axes having an advantage over lances, and lances doing well against swords. While swords may be wielded by many protagonists in the series and may look cool aesthetically, they often get the short end of the stick in gameplay. This is due to the fact that while lance wielders have access to javelins, and axe units can wield hand axes, in most entries, sword wielders don't have easy access to weapons that allow them to fight from two spaces away. For this reason, lance and axe wielding units often are incentivized for players to employ.
9 Over-reliance Of Armor
Nearly every Fire Emblem game features characters toting heavy armor that have notably high defense stats. While armored units may appear strong at first glance due to their bulk, they can often hinder a player due their glaring flaws. Armored units can often be done away with by enemy magic attacks, and notably have the worst mobility of any units in the series.
This means that players are required to wait for them as they trudge across a map, as getting them to where they need to be can be quite a hassle. Even in games in which the rescue mechanic can be used to reposition and carry less mobile units, heavily armored characters tend to sport high constitution, limiting which characters can rescue them.
8 Underusing Iron
Iron weapons are some of the most common and plentiful pieces of equipment in Fire Emblem. While it may by common and slightly lacking when it comes to raw power, iron weapons are easily some of the most reliable weapons the series has to offer. Incredibly lightweight, these weapons are often the most reliable means of allowing a player's units to consecutively attack a foe. While higher damaging weapons such as Steel and Silver may be appealing, there's no harm in keeping iron weapons in a unit's inventory.
7 Undervaluing Fliers
As a tactical strategy game, one of the most integral traits a unit can possess is high mobility. Mobility ensures that a unit can reliably enter combat when they're needed, and disengage when the going gets tough. Some of the most easily accessible flying units in the series tend to be Pegasus Knights. Many new players tend to write off Pegasus Knights due to their fragility and lack of strength, but their excellent mobility has a great deal of potential that can be utilized to great effect.
6 Not Doubling Down On Great Classes
Fire Emblem is a series possessing a wide and varied range of unique types of units and classes with their own strengths and weaknesses. Due to this fact, many players attempt to have no more than one unit of each class in their army for variety's sake. Unfortunately, not all classes are created equally, and some completely outshine others. Classes such as Cavaliers and Wyvern riders should not be underestimated, and the use of numerous units in these classes can often mitigate the difficulty of a given Fire Emblem game.
5 Not Using The Game's Jagen
Nearly every game in the Fire Emblem series contains a powerful pre-promoted character that players re given access to early into the game. Often referred to as "Jagens" after the first of these types of characters to appear in the series, many players avoid using these units at all cost, fearing that they'll steal experience from more deserving units they're attempting to train. As many archetypal "Jagen" characters possess low growth rates and will lose their usefulness later into a game, they should be used while they're still useful early into a game, helping set up easy kills for weaker units, and dealing with particularly difficult threats.
4 Over-conserving Weapons
Many of Fire Emblem's most powerful weapons tend to lack in the durability department. This leads to many players being overly cautious when it comes to using their strongest pieces of equipment. By the time a game is over, many players will still have multiple uses left on their strongest weapons that effectively went to waste.
While we don't suggest immediately spamming the use of legendary swords against unthreatening enemies, they can be incredibly helpful against imposing bosses or other foes that have players against the ropes.
3 Prioritizing Strength
When it comes to the stats of a Fire Emblem unit, many newcomers to the series will often prioritize units with high strength or magic, as these are the stats that are used to determine a unit's damage output. However, the speed stat is just as, if not more integral to dealing damage. This is because units with high speed are able to reliably attack foes consecutively. Units with high speed and lukewarm strength are often able to deal more damage that units with lukewarm speed and high strength due to the quantity of attack they can land. Ideally, a perfect offensive unit would possess high stats in both areas, but its important that players not get tunnel vision when it comes to the strength of their units.
2 Not Getting The Most Out Of One's Convoy
While the Convoy system has seen numerous updates in Fire Emblem's history, many of the most recent entries of the series utilize the game's protagonist themselves as the convoy. This means that players constantly have access to all of the items and equipment they have in storage as long as their protagonist is around. Despite this, players tend to underuse their convoy, while they could hypothetically utilize it to better adapt to situations on the fly.
1 Not Using Dancers, Bards, and Herons
Perhaps one of the most common mistakes made by Fire Emblem players is to disregard and bench one's Dancers, Bards, or Herons. In each of these units respective games, they are most often fragile and incapable of dealing damage to foes. However, they are capable of reinvigorating allies to allow them to move and attack again in a given turn. This allows them to effectively double the output of a player's best unit on each turn, providing unparalleled utility that should definitely be utilized.