The Fell Xenologue is the HOTTEST MESS of All-Time (Fire Emblem Engage Wave 4 DLC Review)

there is a lot of anticipation behind Fire Emblem engages Wave 4 DLC new characters a darker story which is actually Canon and of course new chapters to play the sixth chapter campaign was long anticipated probably even more so after everyone's initial completion of the base game whether it was because characters and story fans wanted to see is Next Step at story writing where gameplay fans wanted to see what else its great gameplay had in store or both once April 6th rolled around many were ready for felios to me after playing the Fel xenologue is the quintessential hot mess of all time it's amazing map Aesthetics incredibly well done soundtrack well-written characters their supports are also amazing by the way and actually suspenseful and interesting story from start to finish with story twists that actually surprised me with an ending that I actually found satisfying and compelling is hysterically twilighted by its unbelievably stupid choices in unit and gameplay restriction users experience and difficulty balance as you may have suspected from the title and the introductory paragraph This is an opinion piece mainly focusing on my issues with the gameplay itself the story and characters May warrant its own much more positive video but one thing at a time and yes I will be pretty much hard criticizing fell xenolog's setup and everything it does mechanically and gameplay wise that is your warning this is going to be negative in nature if you don't like it then you can move on but if you are curious to see my thoughts and if you think that my opinion will resonate with yours then I suppose you can continue watching before I get into the meat of it all parts of my criticism will reference you know who three houses again I can never Escape it and it's DLC centered Shadows so let's start with some historical context on the whole Wave 4 DLC of switchfire emblem culminating in a wave for Side Story cindered shadows was marketed as a unique challenge in three houses because it restricted a lot of core three houses gameplay mechanics and progression systems where three houses had its sandbox Maps unit customization and its abundance of resources CS first restricted your units to buyloth your three Lords and Ash Hilda and linhardt restricting their reclassing to commoner Noble and a tiny class tree of two intermediate classes into their respective advanced class the Wolves only had their Base Class and their DLC class weapon ranks and class exp consequently meant nothing and combat arts and class Mastery skills were unlearnable Cinder Shadows was a game where what you could see was what you got it towed a fantastic line of significantly reducing what made three houses three houses but gave it just enough customizability in the unit progression a class tree a few skills units could use exp gain as well as access to an Armory shop and blacksmith in the abyss itself because of its short run and pre-built units Fire Emblem 3 houses wasn't about long-term resource allocation for specific units anymore it wanted the player to focus on each chapter's goal then move on to the next many people touted cindered shadows as the return to Classic Fe gameplay for this reason cindered Shadows was also function generally its own entity it was saved separately from the base game meaning that nothing from your base game carried over into it bileth the Lords and the students were given nothing beyond what they had and were thus on par with the OCS everyone started at the exact same point and finally there was no maddening mode but normal and hard were balanced very well you didn't need an extra maddening difficulty because the difficulty of hard was sufficient in combination with this Mode's unique chapter goals and gimmicks it didn't need to throw in Annoying overstetted enemies or excessive reinforcements it would have thrown the balance awry I know people have taken issue with cs's map design and map recycling so I can really only speak for myself but I loved my playthrough of Cs and in fact I did a marathon of it years ago on my channel I thought it was a great time and I found every chapter fun I spent the last couple of minutes explaining how centered Shadows functioned because it's very obvious that fell xenolog was designed with a similar principle in mind what happened felsinolog which I will now call FX for short starts with a similar premise it foregoes the sandboxy high abundant resource strategy game and instead limits your units in the following ways once you enter dark lethos characters have fixed classes levels and inventories that scale only as you progress through the story in other words you cannot reclass and can only progress automatically to a unit's natural class line units auto level and rely on fixed level UPS based on their growths and inventories cannot be customized Beyond everyone's starting kit and you never have access to an Armory shop or blacksmith contrasted with cs however you have access to your entire party at the time FX accesses your currently used save and will thus allow the use of the following your roster your support and bond levels inherited skills and emblem weapons but nothing else on paper this means engages units do not start at Ground Zero like cs's base units and OCS do yet ironically FX still manages to feel more restrictive because the consequences of its restrictions are extremely frustrating bad and are counter-intuitive to engage his own unit progression first of all the problem with engage simultaneously allowing the use of your entire roster at the time but forcing them into their Base Class and advanced class with auto levels means that so many units are straight up worthless if you reclast Anna into being a sage in the main campaign to make use of her Stellar magic too bad she is forced to being her ax user self now did you reclass Lyndon into a high crit melee user to optimize his personal and for a 100 crit chance build I certainly did in fact he was one of my favorite units but he's a sage forever now if you know you know reclass anyone and they thrived in that class too bad it's wasted here mileage will vary on earlier's use in his Base Class I personally dislike Dragon child but engage plus is extremely extremely good in FX what the base game rewards for creativity is completely ignored and all the investment one could make depending on if you reclass and built a unit around that well thanks for playing this structure also makes it ambiguous when you're actually supposed to start the DLC if you start the DLC immediately after it's available you are limited to the roster and emblems you have meaning some of the best emblems and units in this mode will not be available as well as items like locked to their fixed Loadout The Selective carryover has another extremely frustrating side effect the original characters the OCS nail nil and the winds are all genuinely bad units to understand what's going wrong with them here's how is structured these units in all six chapters any OC who joins your party is force deployed which on paper makes enough sense it's no surprise that the OCS are treated as pseudo-lords in that they are Force deployed yet the winds can afford to die and not Force the game over this is the only thing about this that makes sense and doesn't frustrate me problem is internally the game will unrecruit every single OC at the end of every map and then re-recuit them with adjusted Auto levels at the start of the next one in other words you never actually recruit them this combined with support and bond Point gain being restricted means they're stuck at a bond level 1. this makes them all every single one even Nell who was supposed to be the good one all functionally objectively worse units than their base game counterparts a problem that skills worse and worse as difficulty increases nil is deliberately hecking awful to an absurd Point Nell is just a worse version of Tamara and alir Celestia starts decent in the first two maps she's in but becomes just a worse version of Celine and Ivy combined Gregory is a worse version of every other sage and Madeleine is just a worse version of Louis or Jade the most value you will get out of them is putting them into botch rolls because all they can do otherwise is provide chip damage at higher difficulties provided they don't miss in combat in fact they're so pathetic as units part of the challenge of hard and maddening and this applies to nil and Nell especially is making sure they don't die to add insult to injury for what may be the result of an internal flag that tells them not to let them do this you cannot trade with them in the battle prep this means that if you want to give nil Makaya for the cleric skill you need to give someone else staves like physic mend and restore to another unit and spend one turn in the actual chapter trading them onto him this applies to every OC in this mode but they're allowed to to equip emblem rings and bracelets why this serves no purpose besides forcing you to waste time and turns for setup and that's not all because the OCS are treated as these quasi-green units that get recruited and unrecruited upon a repeat playthrough of FX they will be unable to make use of any bond level supports or inherited skills you gave them from the main campaign and will be stuck in their level 1 and everything awful awful selves it's actually incredible how terribly implemented this fixed mode for FX is nothing works in an intuitive way the fixed inventory which adjusts itself each map to suit the progressively difficult chapters is also marred with frustrating design choices which get more evident as difficulty increases number one despite every character having a fixed inventory some characters have different weapons than others Diamante is the only character that comes with an armor Slayer which is very important to have in this mode but if you do FX before you get diamond you just don't have an armor Slayer for the entire campaign if Celine died in the main story when you do FX you just don't have access to a 11 sword at all ever which granted is certainly not as bad as being locked to high-mite weapons at the cost of lower hit rates for the entire campaign FX forces you to use lower hit weapons later in the campaign while enemies get more evasive alongside more evasive terrain for them to go under the latter half of FX forces ax users to use silver axes and tomahawks which have lower hit than iron and hand axes which you never get to use Mages that aren't Mystics of which there are only three insuline citrine and Gregory will struggle to hit things as Serge tomes just are something you can't use in this mode period Gregory especially struggles in this regard because in spite of him ignoring terrain bonuses has a dexterity growth of 25 and can't get meaningfully support boosted Madeline also has a dexterity of 25 but is worse off as she is forced to use a 60 and 70 hit rate weapon if she wants to contribute at all to combat the workaround to both is using avoid reduction on enemies via corns water tiles or some personal skills like Rosa autos and like I mentioned you can't inherit things for the OCS for a repeat playthrough because the way FX is structured basically unrecruits your OCS and only allows the use of the FX versions which have nothing inherited or leveled up Neil will always be annoyingly dead weight Nell will always be mediocre and barely contributing to anything beyond chip damage and the odd kill later down the line and the winds will always have problems hitting things in CS you could buy weapons and staves you could customize your inventory and it wouldn't reset every chapter you had the option of reclassing you could level up and the OCS were given the exact same starting point as your base game units but were also extremely good in their own right because CS was designed to make them good Yuri had Fetters of dromie which any unit could use for movement strategies and workable stats throughout happy was a very strong dark magic user with good Mobility Constance could fly and support and baltus was good enough CS managed to restrain you to its selling point of a classic Fe experience but gave you enough Freedom so you had options to tackle it and be created with what you had in effects these don't even feel like units there is no progression at all nothing matters Beyond beating a chapter and moving on they place all these arbitrary restrictions on you that don't feel like a classic Effie experience because classic Fe doesn't work like this it's incredibly ironic to me that in the case of wave fours the team that was outsourced did a better job at understanding classic Fire Emblem then the Fire Emblem developers this is all a little unbelievable because all of these problems are purely user experience and structural choices that are awful and I didn't even get to the gameplay yet these are all things that could be so easily fixed while still maintaining its Challenge and uniqueness you have the blueprint of how the implementation works with cs right there that happened like four years ago you can be someone who didn't like cs's map design but still recognize where it succeeded in this regard quote this doesn't feel balance end quote is an often seen remark when it comes to fx's actual gameplay and from what I've heard about the difficulties it's fallen into the follow issues normal is way too easy enemies are nerfed to the ground and will often have no chance of even hitting you and the final chapter is made much easier as Rafal will only travel directly up instead of going left to right to warp to all the sigils normal is the standard gameplay experience and basically it seems like it's actually easy mode rather than normal I played on hard and it was for the most part a challenge enemies were hard to take down as damage was almost always just not enough to kill often leaving enemies at 1 to 4 HP the gimmicks though they were pretty good chapter 1 was a fine introduction to the mode it was straightforward Nell was actually good and nil's horrible stats were workable through him turning into a support bot with Mikaya the hex gimmick of reducing Max HP into using restore was a great one and actually made use of the staff in a way that the main campaign kinda didn't really do Beyond mending poison chapter 2 introduced Celestia and the map was good fun as well Nell was doing okay Celestia had good Spotlight nil was still support botting an enemy placement and reinforcements weren't frustrating but chapter tree is where things started to get annoying I kept wanting the OCS to contribute in meaningful ways but their flaws became really apparent here it got so frustrating to a point where I completely restarted the chapter and very quickly cheesed the map with Lin and Chloe just killing everything in sight by chapter 4 I was getting visibly frustrated on stream by both the OC's near uselessness and really really bad RNG the double Army gimmick worked for the most part it's nothing new to Fire Emblem but once I got out of the first few turns and was being pursued by Ivy and her Legion of dragons and flyers this chapter felt like it was actually getting fun and remained that way throughout chapter 5 saw the OCS with the exception of Nell removed from the party and I enjoyed the split party Roots the pseudo turn limit of trying to advance while keeping alir and Nell alive and the variants in the map of corridor and Open Space Battles and it was actually one of the funnest chapters in the story which is a good and a bad thing because I was enjoying not needing to use the OCS I was able to use my base units who were already invested in good this is not a good trade-off as DLC which was marketed heavily for playing as new characters you know you messed up when someone can find a chapter fun because they weren't forced to use bad units finally and last chapter 6 which again conceptually is a fantastic map I would know in fact chapter 5 and chapter 6 have gimmicks very similar to those of my rom hack Bloodlines just needed to throw that in there a challenging final map where the boss will destroy terrain and everyone within it and will warp to different sigils absorbing the bracelet-equipped mini bosses to gain an extra life bar are fantastic anti-turdling gimmicks but such a fantastic concept is ruined by its legitimately absurd amount of reinforcement spam once the flyer reinforcements from the bottom and left and the corrupted wire reinforcements from the top arrive with the exception of the left Flyers they will never stop reinforcements are good to keep the player on their toes preoccupied while trying to advance to their main goal but this gets over the top when they've already reached the final sigil on the map trying to end it for my part this Final Chapter was frustrating the hell out of me not only was I just constantly dealing with this spam but my RNG was genuinely some of the worst it's ever been I was missing High hit rates and getting hit by low hit rates and even had to burn another time Crystal because leave quitted me for 13 I know RNG is RNG but it was just salt on the wound alongside the reinforcement spam I was legitimately concerned that the hours I had spent on this map was going to be wasted as I had one Crystal use left and Rafal had three life bars with Sandstorm and Luna from absorbing Tamara and alchrist the reinforcement spam just stopped adding a fair Challenge and was falling into this is insanely annoying territory your map is already challenging you don't need to do this this was again made even more frustrating by the fact that the OCS were all borderline worthless this in every chapter would have gone so much smoother if the OCS could contribute more than they were minimally capable of I can't possibly imagine this is what the developers intended for with these OCS this is around the point where I should expect some Valiant FX map design Defender to say skill issue I want to again emphasize that these Maps taken by themselves were a fun challenge yes I can rant about chapter 6's enemy reinforcement spam but honestly my frustrations come from what's going on with fx's structure and the weaknesses of the OCS when I wasn't getting annoyed by trying to keep them alive and trying to involve them these Maps were a lot of fun there were highlights in my playthrough of all six maps of fun and engaging problem solving restrictions like Cs and FX should be good and challenging because they force you to approach these otherwise open-ended games in a more focused way yes they both do that FX wants to challenge you by limiting your options but my issues don't come from these limitations themselves it's the user experience balance problems and what feel like unintended consequences that come from these restrictions I'm not exclusively complaining that I'm forced to use these OCS I'm complaining because I'm forced to use bad dysfunctional units and I hope that I'm properly explaining the difference to those unaware a method to clear this map even on maddening in one turn was discovered about a week ago it involves equipping a layer with Roy for holdout plus plus higher stats but more importantly sword power 5 from him and reprisal plus from Veronica the former giving attack plus 10 and -10 avoid when using a sword the latter adding 50 of HP lost to attack combined with elyria's liberacion adding 15 attack when fighting or fall and debuffing through draconic hex and strength rallying slash spur attack alir is able to take damage from her fall and deal enough back to surpass the -50 damage reduction from his sigil rinse and repeat and eventually he will die in one turn which is cheesy sure but this method can only be done with end game investment to inherit both to a leader they need a whopping 11 000 SP to spend as sword power 5 is 5000 SP and reprisal plus is six thousand I'm sure as hell not going to grind SP and bond fragments just for this one thing but I'm not hardcore enough I suppose if you don't kill Rafal in one turn from hard to maddening best of luck to you so many attempts to do this on maddening without proper post game investment have led people to bang their heads on the brick wall trying to figure out how to do this to lowering the difficulty to hard because of how frustrating it is which sounds intriguing in a way as if to say that fx's maddening end game is for only the most hardcore of players with the most optimized builds that being said congrats to the individuals who came up with that Allure build though I know it wasn't just one person but a handful of people trying to come up with a solution to maddening's C6 all in all it's a pretty impressive strategy and pretty cool All Things Considered balancing maps and difficulty is a delicate process of near endless testing of enemy placement and Stat allocation to create a challenging yet satisfying experience the fact of the matter is the transitioning from hard to normal is a difficulty Whiplash so much so that normal becomes a skip game setting which is a balancing problem and hard and maddening is made unnecessarily frustrating by its forced use of its bad units bad hit rates and reinforcement spam which the former two at least could have been resolved easily I may come off as really really butt hurt about this because this video is pretty much all negative so I'm trying not to sound super emotional or anything at the end of the day while this is only a sixth chapter ordeal also meant to be a big incentive for getting the expansion Pass worth 30 real dollars FX nails so many other aspects the story is this brutal nihilistic reimagining of Elios Nell's story from start to finish especially to her final choice is shocking yet understood it's hard to get into the Why without getting into spoiler territory but yeah it's just the dysfunctional unintuitive fixed setups and the harsh difficulty scaling that drastically lower the quality of this experience these are good chapter gimmicks and Maps held back by everything I talked about to end on a more productive note how could FX be thick it honestly all comes down to the integration of the OCS the carryover of emblems and inherited skills to the base roster is nice but because of the unrecruit to re-recruit Nature the OCS cannot shine one simple solution is to just give them fixed Bond levels with emblems that adjust with every map like everything else or do that but give them a higher level with bracelets as they are familiar with those in the Rings narratively as for skill inheritance let them inherit skills to the set base SP which increases every chapter because if you didn't notice they do have bass SP that just gets unused a second solution to keep up with the theme of restricting options for a different experience preset everyone with fixed emblem and bond levels skills and with their Canon class that way you could challenge the player by restricting them like before but like CS now everyone is on the same level and the maps can be more tightly balanced because there's no impossible to predict variability in player investment and no player investments will be cheated out because you don't get the chance to use your main character builds in the first place it may sound like a turnout off to restrict the roster even further but you'd be surprised at how if fine-tuned enough with the non-infinite resources but useful preset skills and varied equipment challenging rewarding and creative Fe Maps can be in other words instead of souping up the OCS put everyone on the same start Point like CS had for theirs a hub area could work here but in order for things to fit the narrative an economy can't really exist in the form of an Armory shop or blacksmith unlike Abyss but I don't see an issue with somewhere like lethos Castle being a base where inheritance and bonds can increase Bond levels and SB being fixed for the OCS would also let nil not cheat you out of resources given he leaves at chapter 5 and 6 as well this would give the OCS a fighting chance with the unique trait of being extremely flexible with preset Bond levels with the emblems you already have while playing within the game's rules and for the sake of replayability upon a second playthrough with the OCS unless they're dead in the main story let the player use the OCS in the party a lack of Armory slash shop can be simply resolved by adding more to the Convoy at the start of a map being able to fix Gregory's hit with surge or salvaging what little Madeleine offers in her current state with a compact ax to contribute more would only positively benefit them here's something else actually hilarious about the OCS do you recall my support boost support type video from when people cared about engage and how mavier was the default support type only giving hit plus 10 no matter what the support rank was well guess what every OC is also the default support type yep for those who care the only support boosts you're getting is hit even in the main campaign this is extremely stupid I would give these units support types that aren't just a complete waste of time the Twins and the wins are all tight they could be given C supports with each other while the twins can be given even further viability with an a support together this in particular would give nil further use Beyond being a Makaya slash buyless cornbot and what I mean by the support ranks is exactly that obviously you can't unlock supports to view them as contextually they do not make any sense but visible ranks for the purpose of gameplay thematically makes sense even cindered Shadows did this all the Wolves had sea supports with each other the fixed growths and auto levels are fine and as for the forced Canon class rule I'm honestly not sure how this could change Beyond just giving them another popular class promotion option that might be an L you just have to hold unless you go with the option 2 of preset everything then again given how non-specific these chapter goals actually are maybe you could just get away with carrying over classes anyway balanced normal so it actually fits the definition of normal instead of easy and remove the condition of needing to complete the DLC every new campaign unlike CS there is no alternate timeline these characters are worked directly into the continuity of engage so just do what 3H did and make them playable when FX would have otherwise been unlocked via a flag getting triggered after beating it once FX is completely inconsequential for unit progression anyway and finally just let them trade in the battle preparation good Lord these are my off the Dome propositions to fix the user experience viability of the OCS and to not have the player resources go to waste in the form of build would this affect the balance of hardened maddening terribly besides making the mode Easier by virtue of elevating the quality of the units I genuinely don't think so thanks to the fixed inventory you can't break the flow of these chapters via warp rewarp rescue and entrap except for when you actually do have rescue in chapter 6 but you're giving the player what they should have already common feedback for the mode is that it's way too hard anyway so kill two birds with one stone you know well that was a very very thorough review of Fire Emblem Gage's falzino log this video is really long but I hope you enjoyed it if you're still watching please consider leaving a like and comment down below with your take on FX what you liked and what you didn't like or just something about this video finally if you'd like to support the channel directly you can become a member Channel memberships currently give you the following perks a member badge next to your name custom emotes members only status updates behind the scenes videos and exclusive q and A's this is a great way to support my channel directly I recently posted a video to members and patrons about my feelings on engages various support conversations so if you want to see that please consider joining I'll also be posting a behind the scenes video on this and afterthoughts that kind of thing later on next week thanks for watching deuces [Music] please

Channel: Faerghast

Views: 79,989

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Id: 4Zyz2BAyQFg

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Plinfilore]

I always see people complaining about how challenging and unfair the Xenologue was in hard while I honestly thought it to be a nice challenge that tested if you learned how to properly use the game's emblems and abilities like the break mechanic. Yeah, I had to rewind a few turns on chapter 3 after underestimating Diamant, chapter 4 after not going hard to the right pushing and the final chapter where I played a bit too aggressively which made me lose valuable units to deal with the enemy spam. Though I managed to beat chapter 5 without any long rewinds (the corrupted wolves were quite vexxing though).

Before attempting the DLC on hard I only considered myself an average player but after seeing how many FEtubers including Ghast struggled with it I guess I was just not seeing how good I actually am at Fire Emblem similar to Alcryst. While Ghast struggled even though he (like many others) gave his units weapons other than the ones they come with (for example giving Kagetsu Diamant's armorslayer) I played with every character's base inventory with no changes to them and still found myself struggling a lot less than them on hard. Honestly I'm glad Hard was actually hard and not just "slightly harder than normal" how it sometimes feels.

Tldr: The Xenologue on hard was imo challenging and fair (hard difficulty actually ended up being hard) and quite a few people seem to unfairly call the DLC bad simply because they struggled when hard difficulty actually ended up being as challenging as the name would suggest. The maps were very cool and I loved how the last chapter actually wanted you to use warp strats in rememberance of Fell World Mauvier. Rest easy Mauve! 😢 Also the characters are all pretty great and they made the DLC story quite fun with their interactions. Also loved the dynamic between Nel and Alear and Nel's reason for acting the was she did. Honorable mention to Gregory teasing Zelestia by calling her old and Zelestia telling Mauvier that he "doesn't understand the tenderness of the heart" and him ending up being xompelteld dumbfounded.

[u/Autobot-N]

Skill issue

[u/burningbarn8]

Eh, I had fun on Hard. The maps were hard but didn't feel unfair. Only thing I found frustrating at times was protecting Nil, but as someone who loves FE6 no reason to hate 'cause of that. Going to try Maddening with an Endgame save, before restarting the game to get the new units I beat the first chapter on Maddening in my late-game save and it felt fun and fair, when I tried it again early game it felt impossible, so going back to my late-game save and trying to beat the upcoming missions is something I look forward to, and if I do find it more bs well that's why lower difficulties exist innit.

[u/ohztangdew]

Git gud