• he/they

Dumber than rocks weird media enjoyer


SaGa Frontier II is my favorite game that I struggle to recommend that other people actually play. Part of the SaGa JRPG series, in modern terms it's much more akin to a Visual Novel than a typical JRPG. Except instead of being a novel it leans towards being a visual fantasy history textbook, which I just think is neat.

You play through a series of short scenarios, with a degree of freedom to let you jump around and do them out of chronological order. You have characters who are playable for a single scenario with no mandatory combat (or no combat at all) because that was an important piece of history. You have characters who are playable for one or two scenarios and then never show up again because as far as history was concerned they were only significant for that one brief moment in time. You have major characters who kind of just die because hey sometimes that's how history goes. You have an absolutely horrid somewhat RNG dependent mass combat scenario that's like that because it was historically a battle that the winning side had no real business winning. The game has only a loose attempt at a narrative arc and that's okay because history has no narrative arc. It's great!

Also it's very pretty. The watercolor style is great and the OST rocks.

Now, is the gameplay particularly good or intuitive... Nervous Laughter



Fire Emblem Thracia 776 (aka Fire Emblem 5 or FE5) tends to be known for two things. One is being one of the final games released for the Super Famicom, while the other is being extremely difficult. However, that I'll argue difficulty derives in significant part from the sheer number and variety of systems that FE5 contains, many of which were either never used again in future games or were heavily adjusted. Not that it's an easy game, it's still quite hard, but not quite as difficult as it's reputation implies and can ultimately be the most breakable game in the series.

Engaging with the game in a straightforward fashion will leave you heavily resource starved, unable to deploy your best units on difficult maps, and probably down quite a few units to mechanical gotchas. Abusing the game's mechanics you can win most later maps in one turn if you're so inclined. To dig into why this would happen let's go over the mechanics that the game introduced, or heavily altered from prior games.

1. Capturing Units
Easily the single most impactful new mechanic and one that, aside from a heavily altered implementation in Fates, has never been retread. In FE5 if a unit has a higher build stat than an unmounted enemy you can choose to attack them (with halved stats) and if you deliver a normally lethal blow you instead capture them, while an unarmed unit (typically unpromoted healers) can be captured automatically without the need for combat. This then lets you strip all of the items from their inventory. This can even be done to bosses, assuming they meet the build and unmounted requirements.1 Making aggressive use of this feature will heavily boost your item availability and the game is designed around it as you don't get much money or normal item drops. It can also supply you with rare items, most notably staves, which heavily alter your tactical options for tackling maps.
2. Fatigue
Another hugely impactful mechanic which has not been used since FE5, each unit has a fatigue counter that increases whenever they take an action and when it exceeds their maximum HP they cannot be deployed on the next map. This counter carries over between maps and can only be reset by using a rare/expensive item or by having a unit sit out a map. To facilitate managing fatigue there are occasionally maps that are significantly easier than others. The issue here being that you typically have no way of knowing how hard/easy a map will be your first time seeing it outside of maybe some clues in the pre-battle narration, which is itself not a reliable indicator. The presumably intended way of managing this is to stagger how you deploy units, and to take advantage of those easier maps, but these are not things you have to account for in other Fire Emblem titles.
3. Escape Maps
FE5 was the first game in the series to contain escape style maps (ie. get your Lord to a specific destination). Numerically this means the game contains a lot of escape maps. More than 10 in total (though some of these are optional) and at one infamous point in the early game contains 5 in a row (1 being optional). This plays well into the game's narrative; you spend a lot of the game on the run, but in practice does mean you're constantly having to manage overwhelming numbers of often superior enemy units. A key difference from future implementation of the escape mechanic is that you need to escape all units, not just your Lord. The map ends when they leave and any other units who remain on the map are considered captured and are gone.2 This typically just means that you have to do a tedious little dance at the end of a map to get every other unit off the map before your finishing, though in a few cases it can force you to do a rearguard action to buy time for your weaker units to peace out.
4. Fog of War Maps
FE5 was also the first game to include Fog of War/Night maps where you have limited visibility. These have the potential in any game to be dangerous as the chances of a squishy unit being attacked by an enemy that began their turn out of your area of vision exists. Similar to escape maps they went a bit ham with the amount of these in their first iteration, with every optional map using the mechanic.3 This also synergizes negatively with the capture mechanic because your healers can easily be captured by a flying unit who started above impassable terrain that you'd have difficulty revealing in the first place. Future games would tone down both the volume of these maps and the amount of high mobility enemy units found on them.
5. Infinite Duration Status Effects
Prior Fire Emblem games had had status effects, but in FE5 their duration is permanent unless dispelled. Permanent poison can be dangerous, permanent silence/sleep can be outright devastating. This means it behooves you to acquire antidotes and more importantly status removal staves in quantity. Future games would either not use statuses or give them very limited durations. The big issue with this really comes in when you add the next mechanic.
6. Staves Staves Staves
Another mechanic that had been in prior games but that FE5 cranks up massively. Status staves become common, especially in later maps, and enemies can have warp staves to enable map specific gimmicks like teleporting units right on top of you, with all of these having infinite range. This means you will have to deal with your strongest melee units being infinite duration slept (with 100% accuracy) by a boss located on the opposite side of the map. However, the flip side of this is that you can also acquire these staves and do all this back to the enemy. Sleep their dangerous units, silence their mages, teleport your units from your starting position directly on top of the boss and end the map in one turn (or at least break map triggers) and then rescue them back if needed. This is the aspect of the game which lets you break it over your knee when combined with capturing. After FE5 staves became much more sparsely available and had much more limited ranges.4
7. Movement Stars
Units can have movement stars which give a 5% chance per star to gain an additional turn after ending their turn. The trick here is that enemies can also have these which can throw expected combat math out the window when they double up and kill the unit you expected to safely tank them or reach unit you thought were out of range. There isn't much you can do about these outside of being very careful if you try to bait enemies that have them. This is another one of those mechanics that never came back.
On top of these there are a number of other mechanics experimented with here: letting you manipulate growth rates, dismounting mounted units while indoors (which had been used in FE3), a singular branching set of chapters, a general love of thieves to go along with capturing and establishing red as the other potential color for a Lord's hair. Anyway, apologies if you've gotten this far. I don't really have a closing thesis. I just wanted to ramble about an oddball game that the release of Fire Emblem Engage had me thinking about. I find the mechanical experimentation of the game much more interesting than any discussion of difficulty.




  1. Enemies can also do this to your unarmed units and will instantly strip all of their items upon capture. This is a bad time.
  2. There is technically an optional map near the end of the game where you can rescue captured units, but it's so late that it functionally doesn't matter.
  3. On that note FE5 was the first game to feature optional/gaiden maps, reachable by completing some side objective in the prior map. This should probably be broken out as it's own category but the net impact of these mostly revolves around the difficulty of them and the Fog of War mechanic.
  4. Okay Warp/Rescue Staves have the tendency to let you do broken stuff whenever they have decent availability, even with limited range.