The blood has yet to dry on the Sword of Blaggi as I write this review. Thracia 776, deemed one of the most difficult and obscure Fire Emblem games ever made, is finished. A perfect Thracian campaign, no less, recruiting every possible character my choices allowed, keeping everyone alive, and reaching every single bonus chapter. And I must say - it was worth the experience of playing it, but I'm unsure if I would go to such lengths again were I to play this game a second time.
Thracia 776 is fairly infamous as one of the most brutal Fire Emblem games ever created. The troublesome points of Thracia in my mind can be sorted out into three types.
1. Mechanics reinforcing realism and the difficulty of a small-scale rebellion.
2. Mechanics flooding the game with randomness and luck-based situations.
3. Brutally difficult side-quests, often involving NPC civilians.
--REALISM--
Thracia 776 is the story of Leif, fifteen year old heir to House Leonster, who begins his war to free Northern Thracia from the Loptyr Empire starting from a small coastal village. As such, your troops are few, your weapons are limited, and your war funds are effectively zero. Thracia reinforces these points well, requiring you to Capture enemies, strip them of their equipment, then let them go (or in rare occasions, hold a captured boss to the end of a chapter in order to recruit them and/or access a bonus chapter). I don't mind this system inherently, but in implementing this they remove any and all item drops from enemies, instead REQUIRING you to steal from them or capture them to have any hope of getting their items.
The idea of being a poor army is kind of cut short the first time you can access an arena, around the end of Chapter 7, because then you'll be fighting so much just to level up that money becomes a non-issue. The issue then comes in shops being few and far between, with not much selection either. Still, if you can stock up on stamina drinks, torches and door keys (you need like fifty keys in this game I'm not even joking), you make the game a whole lot easier.
I appreciated being able to get extra equipment by going a little out of my way, but the method of capturing enemies left you fighting at half stats, and without the option to prefer capturing over lethal attacks when defending, oftentimes the enemies you wanted to capture ended up getting killed because they attacked you first. More on this in later sections.
Another mechanic made to introduce realism is the Fatigue mechanic. Now, personally I didn't have much of an issue with this - they give you a huge roster of characters that you'll only ever touch half of more than once or twice, so this is an interesting idea to get you to use more of them. Now, it was never more than an annoyance because Stamina Drinks, while not plentiful, were common enough that if I ever desperately needed one particular person (usually a staff wielder) I could just give them a drink and send them out. I never had a shortage of drinks because of the arena grinding I did, and deliberate stocking up I did whenever they were available.
Overall the realism aspects were interesting at best and annoying at worst. Capturing was an interesting mechanic but I'm not particularly sad that it's never come back (at least in the same way), and while Fatigue made it into Echoes it's a minor annoyance at most.
---RANDOMNESS---
One of the gravest sins Thracia commits is the OVERWHELMING amount of randomness this game throws at you. People who complain that newer Fire Emblem games are "too random" are living life on a feather pillow, because Thracia is as random as it gets.
First and foremost, it is impossible to have a 100% hit chance or a 0% hit chance. At most you will get 99%, which is effective most of the time, but thanks to the single-roll RNG that Thracia uses (the last game in the series to use single-roll for hit calcualtions), that 1% can rear its ugly head often enough to have you throwing your controller down in anguish. Plus, the game uses the 99% cap to hide the fact that certain units literally have plot armor - They can fight you, you can damage them, but any lethal attack is GUARANTEED TO MISS. Luckily only a few units have this plot armor - Fred and Olwen in chapter 10, and Eyvel (an allied unit) for the first few chapters of the game.
Now that lack of guaranteed hits/misses is incredibly minor, especially since in this game you're unlikely to ever get consistent 99% hit chances until near the end of the game after you've maxed skill, speed and luck. This brings back up the point of capturing making you fight at half stats, meaning a high percentage of attacks you make (and attacks made against you) will be around 50%. Basically coin flips. The entire campaign depends on this randomness going in your favor, otherwise you're going to miss that key attack, eat an unlucky crit, or what have you.
Oh, critical hits, that reminds me of ANOTHER mechanic that the game doesn't even mention exists! PCC, or Pursuit Critical Coefficients, are unique hidden modifiers on every unit in the game. It's a number that is multiplied to your critical hit chance on the second set of attacks in any given combat, and ONLY the second set of attacks. If you have a brave weapon, it's the second set of two swings. So you already have to be attacking twice in order to access these multipliers. And while for some units the multipliers are as high as x3 or x4, some units have a PCC of 0. Meaning that even if they DO get a second attack, even if they are using a killer weapon or something, it's physically impossible for them to crit on their second attack.
Want more randomness? No? Well too bad! Because stat growths in this game are ALL OVER THE PLACE! You have Crusader Scrolls to patch up growths and make them somewhat consistent, but you'd better hit up a wiki because the game ain't telling you nothin' about what the scrolls do.
In speaking of random growths, did you know that Thracia is the only Fire Emblem game to have a growth rate for movement? Yep, every unit has a *VERY* slight chance to increase their movement rate when they level up. I only realized this when I looked and saw my Pegasus Knight had 11 movement. Because my translation was gimped so that all I ever saw was a glitchy text saying something like Animnuirau stacked on top of itself. But this extra movement is SO IMPORTANT! Movement has always been the most important stat in fire emblem, so to give units a 1% to 10% growth rate in movement is an insane decision, making units wildly more or less useful over their entire lifetime based on a handful of random rolls.
But that's not the only random element related to movement! Every unit has between 0 and 5 "Movement Stars," which are permanent features of the unit and cannot be moved. Some enemies have them, and many (but not all) of your allied units have them. For every movement star a unit has, they have a 5% chance of getting another turn after their first action. To my knowledge this can never chain more than once, but getting a second turn at a key moment can literally swing an entire chapter, and such a low percent chance of this happening across the board is mind-bendingly infuriating.
---SIDE QUESTS AND CIVILIANS---
But perhaps the most frustrating part of Thracia 776 is its insistence on putting unarmed civilians - usually children - not just in the line of fire, but VITAL to several side-quests throughout the game. They are helpless, being captured immediately or sometimes just killed by a stray javelin out of nowhere, uncontrollable, unpredictable in movement order, and also completely necessary in order to complete certain side-quests. Now, for many of them you can just carry them on your units' shoulders to their houses or the exit of the map, but in some situations the civilians need to do specific tasks.
Enter Xavier, a fairly mediocre unit all things considered, but one with perhaps the most frustrating recruitment requirement I have ever seen. To avoid explaining in detail, I will link you to my video on the topic: https://youtu.be/FA-5Zw2lotw
Simply put, eight civilians need to talk to eight armor knights. Each one is linked to a specific one, with no indication of who is linked to whom, and all eight of them need to survive the transit across the map - through hallways only 2 squares wide at best - and meet each of their matches. If the front people don't match correctly, then the joke's on you, they'll just stand there blocking each other. Absolutely infuriating.
There are other quests involving civilians too, and usually the rewards are good enough that you'd be hard-pressed not to at least try to complete these secondary objectives, but the game goes out of its way to make it infuriating. Child hunts or no, I could care less about these children who are in every single dungeon of every two-bit castle in the country.
---Final Thoughts and Overview---
So is Thracia 776 a bad game? To some people it might be, but I actually enjoyed it. Now, bear in mind that I DID play it on an emulator, and heavily abused save-scumming and RNG manipulation, but with the incredibly random and cruel nature of the game a part of me felt justified in doing so.
Whatever the case may be, this game would be a nightmare to play blind. I only used a wiki to make sure I didn't miss any recruitments or bonus chapters, but the level of difficulty this game creates is mostly amplified because of its sheer randomness and the frustrating nature of some of its bonus objectives. Take those two away, and the game becomes actually quite enjoyable and not particularly difficult.
Thracia 776 may never be my favorite FE game, but I'm certainly glad I got to enjoy it the way I did. Even if the translation was bare-bones, the game was still a Fire Emblem experience through and through. Take the legends of its difficulty with a grain of salt, as it's more frustrating and random than truly difficult, but it still stands as an excellent learning tool for what to do - and what NOT to do - when designing enjoyable and fun difficulty in a strategy game.
If you want to hear more about what I think about the NON-mechanical elements of Thracia, head over to This post. I find the rest of the game surprisingly simple and powerful, which adds all the more frustrating that the mechanics are this obtuse and complicated.
Now if you'll excuse me, there's only one Fire Emblem game I have yet to play, and it's just waiting on my desktop for me to boot up.
No comments:
Post a Comment