Collection essentials #192: Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 (SNES)

The fifth Fire Emblem game was one of the last Super Nintendo/Super Famicom titles released, near the end of the millennium, when Nintendo’s NEXT console was already more than halfway through its lifespan! 

This game is a side story to Fire Emblem 4, and it takes place in between 4’s mid-game time skip. So it’s no surprise that some characters from this game are from 4, including the main character himself. This is no little afterthought side game, though, as they went all-out in making Thracia 776 a full-length full-featured Fire Emblem campaign. It actually plays closer to Fire Emblem 3 than 4, though it does retain some elements from the latter, such as the graphical style, skills, and of course the “weapon triangle” which I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

FE5 isn’t as strikingly unique as 4 was, but there’s still plenty of new gameplay additions, some of which would be commonly seen going forward and some that were never done in quite the same way again. This is the first game where you can “rescue” another unit on your team. This means if a unit’s “constitution” stat is high enough, they can pick up a friendly unit, rendering them safe from attacks as long as they are “rescued”, but the rescued unit won’t be able to do anything, and the rescuer will see their combat performance reduced due to carrying another person. Another major addition that became a norm for the series is fog maps, borrowed from the Famicom Wars series made by the same developer. In these maps, you can only see a certain number of squares in front of you, and there are ways to increase your vision and/or exploit the lack of visibility to strategically hide your units. In future games’ fog maps, you could see the terrain in the fog, just not the enemies themselves, but in FE5, everything in the fog is pitch black, which makes it quite a bit tougher. This game is also the first to have “gaiden” chapters, which are optional hidden fights that can be reached if a certain criteria is met when one clears a certain chapter. 

As for FE5 elements that never got used again in the same way, the biggest one is probably the ability to capture enemies upon their defeat and take their stuff! When going for the kill, you can opt to attempt a capture, in which case your battle performance will be inferior, but you’ll get the wonderful reward of free stuff if you succeed. This game also has special scrolls which, when held by a character in their inventory upon leveling up, will affect how their stats grow. I like this a lot, as it gives the player some choice in how their characters turn out. A rather strange mechanic is a fatigue system, where if you use a character too much in a given chapter, they may be too tired and have to sit out the next battle, with only limited ways to heal the fatigue and get their butts back out there quicker. This sounds like it could be a huge pain, but I found it not to be as bad as I feared when I played through the game.

FE5 has a certain reputation for its high difficulty. That’s not unwarranted, but I find it’s a little inaccurate to simply call the game hard. Part of it is that you often just need to know what’s coming in order to succeed. This means that after you try out a chapter once, you likely will fail, but probably will win the second time. This is certainly something I’d consider a flaw, since it gives the game a trial-and-error feel. There’s also a hidden easier difficulty, and I’m not sure how much easier it is, but it should help players who don’t want to be overly frustrated.

I played FE5 with a translation guide in my later teen years. I didn’t get much out of the story, probably since I hadn’t properly experienced the story of the previous game, so I do want to give it a replay at some point. I really like a lot of the gameplay elements here, but this game is held back by its level design, which I felt left something to be desired, either due to the aforementioned trial-and-error problems, tedium (such as wasting turns so ballistae to run out of ammo), or times where I felt like I had to rely on having a little luck to win. Maybe my opinions will change a bit if and when I get around to replaying the game someday. There is now an English fan translation patch, so that ought to make it more fun. As a big Fire Emblem fan, it’s a clear essential.