*Hits blunt* Dude, end button is a dance for all your units...

I played PoR for the first time recently, and that BEXP mechanic is genius. That is singlehandedly the best anti turtling incentive I have yet seen in any FE game, and it is a shame that it never returned in non Tellius games.

The most powerful command in Fire Emblem is "Touch Grass"

"""""sometimes"""" Jaffar dies before you can reach him."

Moving away from the giant ball of death and playing more aggressively has made fire emblem much more fun for me in general, it's a great feeling to clear out a map with units scattered across the map all low on hp

Getting Blietzkrieg in Echoes was a great experience. It completely broke me of any hoarding tendencies. Excellent use of an achievement.

Tbh that’s why I love the dawn brigade so much. Since you have so few units and most of them suck, you really have to make use of every resource available at all times, and can’t really afford to just have a unit do nothing for a turn. Of course the giant ball of death still works sometimes, but it rarely feels like the best or even the obvious strategy for approaching the map.

Giant Ball of Death is underrated as a viable solution to beat CQ Lunatic! The general idea is the same, put your strongest unit in front with squishy units behind them The only difference is rather than bait and switch, you simply hit them really hard with the bait once they come close since the Royals are so much stronger than the other units both offensively and defensively they're the best bait and the best at eliminating the enemies A ball of Xander/Camilla/Corrin walling off squishy support units like Azura/Elise/Laslow can slowly slide forward through almost every map in the game tanking and eliminating enemies slowly, but reliably and without too much trouble The trick is to abuse the Rallies/Auras/Personal Skills you have that allow you to buff in an area around you by cramming every buffing aura you have into the right space you create a ball of death that's able to stand up to even the strongest enemies in the game, aside from the few maps with turn limits you can almost always fall back on the Aura boosted ball of death! It's important to note that while CQ has tons of debuffs, the tools the player has to buff their own units greatly out shine the tools the enemy has to debuff your units, as long as you have enough overlapping auras the enemies won't be able to break through... until Inevitable End gets involved at least, but that's only on 2 maps Of course setting up the auras is certainly more complex than other games would expect of you, but it's a good skill to learn for some maps

God damn Hoshi you always bring your A game with your edits. Also great vid, Mekkah! End Turn Spam FTW!

Ah, yes, when my ol' reliable Giant Ball of Death doesn't work. Time to use Two Slightly Less Giant Balls of Death.

New Mystery Lunatic / Lunatic Reverse are an even better case study because there the ONLY strategy is breaking the deathball or only gathering it before a specific map part breaks it again.

I would have never built any support in FE GBA without the End Turn Button, I have to admit.

Nothing is more satisfying than just parking Dedue into a hoard of enemies

My guess was Wait since it means you don't have to engage in unfavorable match-ups/situations like being forced to suicide a weak unit into a strong one like the AI does. End Turn is kind of just a Wait macro, though my reasoning was a bit different

This was a great video! Top notch editing and quite thought provoking!

Lanky Kong in a Mekkah video, you love to see it

I was expecting to be "trade" the most powerful command, and since you didn't mentioned in the intro, I'm sure you actually think it is. When I play FE I always try "the intended way" on my first attempt of the map, and only pull up the "ol' reliable" death ball on second tries, when I know I took too long and lost treasure or someone dies (the first happens a lot on FE hacks, and the latter was common on 3H and Awakening). When playing Vision Quest (still not finished it), it felt great to be able to accomplish things on first try without resetting. Like, in the nightmare chapter, I already had a feel on how that game worked, I left some units behind to deal with reinforcements and protect the kids, send some for the bottom boss and some for the left boss. In the end, I had a "triforce" of sorts, with a small team on each part of the map, which felt way better than most other maps I played, official or fan-made. Partly because this game communicates well what can and will happen, something that new players could really use. I imagine the "wait for 64 turns on specific tiles" strategy you mentioned, or the "reinforcements only appear when crossing this bridge, so I'll end turn without being there so slower units can catch up" wouldn't work without precise prior knowledge, which works for replays or challenge runs, but for a regular, blind play-through, I'll stick with "trade > end turn", since I don't usually replay games.

New pitfalls video incoming - hoarding turns

One of my least favorite Things to happen in Fire emblem is when you get to a certain part of the map and reinforcements come from behind, but the enemies in front don't move towards you so the optimal strategy is just retreat and deal with the reinforcements before moving forward. I really wish they put you in situations where you're fighting more than one battle at a time (Like Thracia's chapter 24!)

Thanks for this video. I think it’s fine to have some maps in the game, especially early ones or optional ones, give the player a lot of time to complete them. However, it definitely enriches the player experience when most maps give restrictions of some kind or pressure the player into completing it a certain way. Adding a quest board that gives rewards for fulfilling certain conditions at the end of a map could be a really great way of incentivizing efficiently beating a chapter, even for lower difficulties. Another comment mentioned bringing back bexp which I’m honestly shocked IS has completely neglected all this time when it was such a great feature.

Great video Mekkah! I always appreciate your focus on enjoying the game however works for any individual but helping to open peoples eyes to other options

turnwheel/divine pulse/whatever it's called in engage is a great way to let players to unclentch their deathballs and go for more risky and exciting plays, which is one reason why i LOVE those mechanics. In the vast majority of maps from accross the series, deathball is the strat with the lowest margin of error compared to its chances of success. It may be slow and mind numbing but the alternative is having to reset the game. Giving players the ability to not be as hardly punished while trying to have fun is great. THOUGH, thats not to say that rewind is the only mechanic that can do that. The additional player phase tools and resources available in newer games (like combat arts, skills, tonics, gambits, dualstrike/guard, etc.) also encourage the player to break out of their shells, but I feel rewind is the best for knocking down the fear that snuffs creativity.

such a fun and informative video mekkah, thank you!!

I like the Giant Ball o Death strat, but i much perfere to use a pincer move, where i split my party in two, one A team, and one B team, the A team go in fast and hard, while the B team take the long and easy route, coming in to flank when the A team has been held back and is in need of the assist. This gives me a lot more speed and flexibility then the GBoD strat, but keeps the general concept and bulk of it. It also lets me get a few more specialized units like a fast looter or glass cannon assassin, without getting a weak spot in my army, since a weaker part is already in the design. Trading reliability and damage for flexibility and speed, much more to my liking.

I think the Giant Death Ball is definitely worth talking about, baiting out enemies and then killing them is basically how I and many other players play FE, because it’s a very risk free strategy. I’d say it’s less that End Turn is OP, and more the enemy’s inability to do anything other than charge at the nearest enemy, heedless of their chances, or lack thereof is easily exploitable. At the same time however, while I like incentives to go fast, I don’t like when I _constantly_ feel like I have to go fast. The villages in Genealogy in particular really began to stress me out after a certain point with how far away some of them were, and how fast you needed to be. Eventually I just gave up trying to rescue them, because it was just too stressful to try and gamble on my fastest units making it there in time. Playing riskier sounds fun and all, until you realise that means praying to RNGsus that your small, nimble squad is able to handle the time pressured objective I think BEXP from Tellius is a great example of anti-turtling, you get good, useful rewards for playing fast, but you’re never doomed without it, you’ll still get a handful of it even if you’re a bit slower than required. And because it’s a resource available on every map, you don’t need to constantly pressure the player with villages and thieves in every chapter.

Giant Ball of Death is a pretty nice strategy, though I think I tend to move away from it as a game progresses and my units can hold their own a bit more. I thought Gambits in Three Houses was a pretty interesting way of discouraging it throughout the mid and late game. Even super tanky units struggle to survive under gambit debuffs if there's more enemies around, and the enemy can deny several of your units a turn at a time with a single attack. Conversely, the player in Three Houses can play extremely aggressively with gambits. The 1 use per map gambits tend to have huge effect ranges, and they can just completely wreck an enemy formation. I love running up to a group of enemies and locking them down with Blaze or Assault Troop. Easy pickings for the rest of the army.

To me fire emblem is at it'd most fun when you play quick and improvise to win. When I do repeat play threws I try to hit average turn counts hell I'm currently trying to beat conquest lunatic in average 15 turns per map so maps like chapter 9 and 11 that are at its easiest if you take it slow I have to push towards the goal wail getting as much out of the map as possible and its alot of fun currently on the map you get Leo and planning ways to get rid of and avoid the status staffs wail constantly pushing forward is alot of fun

There is a 3rd methot to deal with the ball of death that New Mystery uses. Making the enemys so crack beyond logic that even cap units can't deal with them. It's very basic, but forcing to face enemys that are imposible to powercreep works.

Cool video idea. Without end turn, you couldn't get Renault's A supports vs the fire dragon

My default is to always play the maps slow, even without a ball of death. It keeps the calculations simple so I can play faster in real time, even if the turn count is higher. I found Fates dual attacks and skills pretty weighty to calculate all the time.

Ohhhh, so that's the name of the only strategy I've been usingXD. I haven't tried that many games, but a giant ball of death somehow always formed itself, Thank you dor the lecture, Mekkah, 've learned new things=3

Was I baited? Yes. Did I enjoy this video regardless? Yes. Do I feel like a Fire Emblem enemy who was lured into Mekkah's range to feed exp to his hungry Edwards and Lilinas? Yes.

Is the MVP the End Turn Button, or is it BARTH with his BEEFY 14 BASE DEFENSE holding the entire armed forces of Bern at bay?!

I guess I have Mekkah big brain since seeing the thumbnail I thought “is it wait?” it seemed the most logical and funny one

Beautiful intro and beautiful edits miss/mr editor

For playing quickly, a game that always encouraged me to play quick and use minimum turns was Valkyria Chronicles. You're graded based on turns used and getting the best rank means more exp and money. Granted the turn limits can be generous and there are some ways to trivialize the game, but it encourages thoughtful strategies that otherwise wouldn't happen if you have all day.

The production quality of this vid is crazy good. 👍🏽. This is next level Mekkah. End Turn and enemy phase strats are really what set fire emblem apart from other strategy games, and yeah I agree that FE as a whole encourages the giant ball of death strategy across every game. Hilariously Thracia sorta circumvents this by having the enemy capture your unit if they aren’t holding a weapon. So the tank there still has to fight and attack haha.

One can carefully map out jumps and movement in a platformer and never fall down and be set back. But it's more fun screwing around, being set back but pulling off some great moves. Splitting up the team, doing different tasks and finishing a chapter early with a strategy one came up with before is giving one a great feeling even if it means to restart a bunch.

I'm not someone who uses the Death Ball strategy too often, but I am definitely guilty of turtling whenever possible. While it is annoying at times, I do appreciate when the game challenges me to try out different strategies and solutions to solve the problems in front of me. I think a great example of this that happened to me not long ago was a map in Awakening. Now I was playing on Normal/Classic, but the point is that I had been turtling for most of the game up until that point if a map was particularly problematic. My turtling is less a desire to be cautious and moreso that I like training units as evenly as possible within reason--which is not wise in hindsight. Eventually, the game started throwing reinforcements at me constantly, and because none of my characters were OP because of the balanced training, I couldn't leave specific people to deal with background reinforcements, but I also couldn't just send someone ahead to clear everything in front of me with little risk of dying. It forced me to start trying different things to proceed through the map more quickly, while also forcing me to actually focus on some combat units more than others to make sure they could deal with challenges without risk of death. I find it really hard to not just train my characters somewhat evenly because outside of the time I wasted on it, a good few of these games--like Awakening and Echoes--basically allow you to grind endlessly for both exp and money. Since my RPG experience comes from series that don't give you such a ridiculously massive roster with variable odds of stat boosts per level, my approach was always to just grind because I was willing too, but it's been recently holding me back a lot more. All of this to say that watching these videos, along with the varying ways different games try to manage difficulty, has taught me some valuable lessons that have made the game so much more dynamic and interesting. I still have no interest in completing maps as quickly as possible, but I think it would be an interesting challenge to tackle one day in one of the games I have more experience in--like Three Houses. Three Houses was also my first FE game, so going back to it about 1.5 years later after trying a few different games in the series and learning more from videos like yours will be a very fun experience I think.

I like giving each unit a unique role! It's satisfying to be put in challenging situations and still come out of it without losing anyone. Fates was the first FE I ever played, but Conquest Lunatic is still a bit beyond me.. I've done a bunch of other FE games on maddening / lunatic, but when I last attempted CQ Lunatic, I hit a wall at Takumi's castle ^^;

This is probably one of the most useful commands in Gaiden, and by extension Echoes. People complain about how big and open the maps are, but it's not really that big of a deal. Gaiden AI, with very few exceptions, is programmed to move toward you even if you're outside of its range. Further, every map, with two exceptions in Gaiden and three in Echoes, is a rout map, so there's never a particular point on the map you need any of your units to be. So, at the beginning of the map, you can immediately make the map smaller and easier by simply ending your first turn without doing anything at all. Just don't forget when you do this to also repeat along with Grey: "Come at me, fools"

A small, fast-moving death ball I like to run in SS sometimes: Amelia (Cav) Franz Forde Kyle I do support conversations between them so that Franz and Forde are always buffed by each other (when in range of course), as well as Amelia and Kyle, respectively. Then I just... have them fight as a unit. It's honestly so good it makes me wish SS were harder. Tangent: SS romhack with greatly increased difficulty but also 10 supports per character instead of 5 would go hard I reckon

I was thinking it was going to be "Wait", but close enough...

I was going to guess Wait, so close.

Random thought upon seeing thumbnail. Was like what if...there was no wait and end turn command. At the mercy of autoend one would have to avoid softlocking by always being in a position to do an action that ends a units turn after it. Maybe things like rescue/take/give/drop and use pure water make this easier than I imagine. To actually engage with the actually video at hand... When one plays going for the Blitzkrieg achievement they will probably make notes of where turns are spent so they know how much budget is left. One might also like to see how others did once they've finished (or if they're more a preparation type reading logs can give idea of maps that might take a long time). It can be fun to compare and contrast runs too. Giant ball of death (say, are bait and switch or turtling subtly different to ball of death or just different names) I'll use it as a crutch and probably use it first playthrough more than I'd like but while safe, it's a bit fiddly and slow. I'm also a bit traumatised about using it as it was an especially horrible experience to try and play FE4 like that (think I quit on chapter 2) and I only started to enjoy FE4 after I was shown (via ZSNES movies that usually desynced well before the end) that you send your cav forward and you try to get your foot units into a useful position for later parts of the map (most maps are linear enough to guess this) which coming full circle means there will be some time when you use end turn despite a load of units not doing anything. I guess with all of this is the player has a lot more freedom than the enemy. The enemy can't choose to deploy different units and it has to play by the programmed rules. About the most you can get out of the enemies is if they'll refuse to fight someone they can't hit/damage and/or take actions out of their deployed order. Finally, a few years ago I gave that talk to translator AI the prompt Fire Emblem Pitfalls and it wrote a few paragraphs about the pitfall of going too fast including phrases like "In this weeks episode" (when with FE pitfalls weekly?) and then doing the AI off the wall thing of talking about a "don't run" mode in some other game.

I was fully expecting it to be the give command ngl

A level 16 Swordmaster Edward. You could almost call him a Radical Edward. :D

My first answer was End Turn before clicking on this video with Rescue at a close second.

You press end turn to finish your turn. I move my unit to the same spot to finish my turn. We’re not the same.

this video was not about the end turn button at all but i liked it

I will admit, I tend to play FE very casually and make liberal use of giant ball of death, particularly because it lets me feed any unit I really want to use. It’s part of the reason why I like FE3 so much. Because, its combination of Paragon-granting legendary weapons, fixed exp gain, Star shards, Starsphere make it a gold mine for maxing out the stats of scrubby units. Its fairly simple map design aids this imo; even though this makes it ludicrously easy. Although there is absolutely something to be said about games encouraging you to push forward with white-knuckle time-sensitive objectives. Killing Takumi in Conquest chapter 10 is a fantastic example. I may not like to play efficiently, but I sure do enjoy chasing thieves lol. Great Video! Loved the editing. ps: Would I enjoy Thracia? Scrollboosting and infinite range staves seem really enticing but I’m worried about it’s intimidating map design and pseudo soft lock conditions. Any thoughts?

Replaying FE games recently has made me start comparing efficient strategies vs slow strategies a lot. Whenever I played an FE game for the first time, I tender to rely on ball of death, support grinding, arena abuse, etc. and I wasn’t sure why until I tried to play the games differently. One thing I realized is that, for me at least, using slow strategies is usually done to minimize risk, even if it doesn’t maximize reward. Like mentioned in the video, most players are completionists, so they’ll likely decide to reset if they lose a unit. Having to do several turns, or maybe even the whole chapter again is a huge risk that players don’t wanna take, so even if it isn’t as fun, they’ll turtle through maps out of fear of losing progress. I do think the turnwheel helps a bit with this, since you can take bigger risks, and if they don’t pay off you can go back and try a different, maybe slower strategy. On the games that don’t have turnwheel, I feel like playing with turn counts in mind because of side-objectives like villages, chests, or even getting a gaiden chapter if you finish the chapter quickly is enough to motivate players.

End turn is op because we don't have to press wait with every unit (even though in the older games you had to end turn even if you have no units available)

Don't forget to join Mekkah's youtube membership, you'll get a free energy drop, no pinky promises.

All the tactics in this video look like my normal playthroughs.

I was gonna say end turn for the lols but darn, you beat me to the punch

The most powerful action is actually L+R+Start. Character dies? Bad level up?Forgot to equip a certain weapon or skill? L+R+Start saves all

sick remix in the intro also sick vid tbh

Blue Lions' final map on maddening does this quite well. If you don't hurry, your squishies (and therefore your healers) WILL die. Better not to loiter, eh?

I don't remember much about Conquest. It's been a long time since I've played it, and my 3DS has since died. I know I only played it on Normal, and I remember a couple of things. One was wasting an inordinate amount of time farming a DLC mission to craft a Pebble+5 which ended up being fairly worthless. The other is the one chapter that continuously spawns punchy zombies with poison skills and 0 EXP value. I remember thinking it was going to be awful until I noticed that they couldn't kill Effie because she had enough DEF to tank everything, so I had her carry Corrin to the goal and deployed nobody else. Also End Turn is literally required in the early FE games that don't have auto-end, so you will need it constantly to avoid softlocks~

Giant ball of death is the only way I’ve ever gotten donnel off the ground. Wrecked by ambush reinforcements but soooo worth

The siege command: Am I a joke to you?

The most powerful command is the seize command. Every time I use it I win the chapter.

A 12 minute video about the end turn button? Excellent! What's next? A video on the L button?

Seconding this sentiment. I used to be kind of a slow and too careful player, which worked fine for keeping my units alive but... I think going too slow gets boring. I kept this up until well, Conquest chapter 10 of course. I used to keep up the slow strats, make chokepoints, and wait for the enemy to come to me but well, that made the chapter a damn nightmare to deal with. I realised later on that if I pushed the enemy as far back as I could, played more aggressively, and then retreated when the Dragon Vein was activated, the stage was soooo much more enjoyable, and honestly, easier, despite me taking higher risks with it. I try and keep that lesson in mind with FE these days, and I think overall my enjoyment of these games is a lot higher. Not to say that the giant ball of death isn't a viable strategy (and sometimes you really need it), but it's just one strategy. Shouldn't be your only one. (... Spamming end turn for the next four hours to max a character out in one map is also a viable strategy I guess, just one I'm not sure I have the patience for haha. Maybe one day).

Mekkah embraces grinding bosses for hundreds of turns?? 😳

Luna Con is... Interesting in how it deals with the ball of death. While chapters like 21 ask you to position you ball of death, Endgame says fuck you if you want to do that. It's an interesting way of making the player have to play in different ways, but it's also a very alien game because of it

will watch the video in a second but before that: my prediction is that it's "wait"

Hinoka's chapter in Conquest is probably the most blatant example in my mind where the giant ball of death strategy just doesn't work. The game just counters it by having the enemy pegasus knights always more movement than you, and the player has to be really smart about how they position their army to deal with this, as well as determining when it is the appropriate time to use dragon vein to slow the fliers down. Plus there are reinforcements galore. Needless to say, I hated this map the first time I played conquest, but that doesn't mean I think it's poorly designed. In fact, it does the player a favor by teaching them to develop new tactics and solutions to tackling this situation. The pair-up mechanic certainly makes this more fun to experiment with.

I just wanna say thanks for teaching me in one of you playthroughs that I don’t hafta use the tower to grind amelia in FE8, I can just poke an archer with a stick over and over~

Glad I stuck around past the bait title and such, another good video eventually grew out of it.

it's actually the power button

As an offensive player I hate playing slow/turtling but I will say even playing that was its own downsides. For example FE6 Ch.18b punishes me visiting every village as fast as possible with unreasonable reinforcements

spamming wait has the same effect but slower

The %chance ability to get a Gold Bullion on your main character and Sage Lissa almost manages to break Lunatic Awakening. I say almost because it is still a rng slog. I have tried to directly copy KuroiTTV strategy which is the highest level Fire Emblem Awakening player on KZfaq. I have found the strategies heavily rely on small odds of rng success sometimes in the 1 in 100 or worse. I have tested his strategies and even though they are the highest level in KZfaq; I have been forced to adapt trying to invent new strategies. His videos did help me to advance my game, then I hit a snag.

Lara “Am I a joke to you?”

It's lysitheas warp actually 🥳

W

Not gonna lie, i thought it was going to be hitting the reset button.

Lord wins by doing absolutely nothing

end turn is useless since it automatically happens when you hit the wait command enough times.

Giant ball of death is defjnetly a mood it and variations of it like island defense (where i find a place that hard for the enemy to grt to but one range tanky unit 0lus archer or a mage and have my healer run around makimg sure the defnders aremt injuried. Extremly basic never claimed to ne smart the other is the ball of death nad Jagem which just memath main team fights the enemy and the Jagen goes to take care of the 5ime sensitive objective thqt no my hands

I thought end turn before watching. So many FE games are enemy phase focussed

So all in all, using strategy in a strategy game is good. Good to know.

Items

FE4 turtling is at its weakest IMO. Not only do you have to keep progressing towards your objective across such wide maps, but also enemy Canto groups can just gang up on one guy, making characters besides Gen 1 Finn or Gen 2 Forseti user get focused and killed more often than not.

While end turn might be the most powerful tool in 90% of the games due to how they were created to deal with the player (or to be more specific, how they were not designed to deal with cheese strategies), I think as I grew older playing these games I desired to try to use everyone in ways to make the choices feel more impactful. Knights should tank choke points, fliers should be kept on-hand to finish key targets or ferry units to key locations, cavs should be ancillary to the group and make things move smoother usually via rescue chains. And the games in the franchise I like the most facilitate this because your god units aren't as numerous, the stat disparities on average never make late encounters pointless , and there isn't an overwhelming amount of factors that cause decision paralysis (Fe2, Fe3, Fe6, Fe9, Echoes etc). I'll be honest and say that the looks of the newest Fire Emblem, whatever it's being called now, has me very disinterested after the good direction I thought Three Houses was going in. If it has any chance of pulling me back in it will be if it incorporates restraint so there is some sense of impact again in the decisions the player makes. Although I could be completely wrong about it and there is a real continuing Fe15, whereas this new toothpaste senpai is just repping the next gatcha in the franchise - a Heroes 2 in all but name.

You say End Turn is the most powerful command, yet all your play-throughs enable "Auto End Turn" Curious

incorrect give supremacy

Ike is better than Kieran Debaters be like: Of course End Turn is the best command. You can't beat FE4 without it, duh.

For me cheesing a game is just completly senseless. Although Factors like enyoing Characters or a Story can be just as Important the Fun of playing Videogames largely comes from challenging yourself. Instead of cheesing Fire Emblem through Boss or Priest abuse which, the End Turn Button or grinding in General (which are Options clearly unintended by the Developers) i can also just play Fire Emblem Fates on Normal/Phoenix or in Case of Roms Cheat. Both Options let you stomp trough the Game without any thought but playing on a low diffculty saves alot of time while doing so. And Beating without thinking is not something you wan't in your Strategy Game.....

No it's autobattle.

Memes the video

Fire embelm

Honestly, even before seeing the reveal in the video, I had a hunch it was the End Turn button. Like, the fact you can end a turn without moving everyone is extremely strong. You don't need to move someone, you don't need to attack anyone. You're not forced to do anything.