In my previous post here at NAF Musings, I noted that I had returned to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, to finish a non New Game+ Maddening run on the Crimson Flowers route.
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I had some concerns about the fact that I had not played Three Houses in a while and that I was resuming from the end-game of one of its routes on the highest difficulty. However, I was happy to report in my previous post here that my first three battles went well. I then began the two-battle finale. We ran into a few problems.
First was the chapter 17 Crimson Flower battle, "Field of Revenge":
Field of Revenge Maddening Map
I failed the first two times I undertook the battle. In the first instance, I split my forces and ended up being overwhelmed by monsters and an endless stream of Pegasus Knights. In my second attempt, I was unable to move some of my most vulnerable units out of harm's way after clearing about 2/3 of the enemies. However, I realized that I had been making my life unnecessarily difficult. The map is cut in half by a river, and there are two shoals which allow land units to cross the river. I play Fire Emblem on my TV (Switch in docked mode) and the map was quite dark. As I explained in The New Leaf Journal, I missed far left and far right shoals on my first attempts.
Missing the Shoal in Fire Emblem
After I realized that there were three shoals, I completed the map without much difficultly on my third attempt by swiftly moving my forces through the left (to end Pegasus Knight reinforcements ASAP) and then slowly worked my way right, preempting units from turning into monsters. Things went so swimmingly that after defeating three of the four Generals required to win the battle (the Mercedes replacement, Dimitri, and Rhea), I decided to take out three monsters for extra experience going into the final battle before I dealt with Sylvain to accomplish my mission.
After having rectified my shoal error, I thought of an article I wrote about the virtues of teaching others how to avoid video game errors by leading them into error - inspired by a SNAFU I had in my previous Golden Deer Maddening run in Fire Emblem.
Teaching the Art of the Video Game Snafu
The final battle, which takes place in a burning city with a number of stairs, proved to be a huge pain.
The End of a Dream Maddening Map
The final map structurally favors flying units and disfavors mounted units. Unfortunately, I had a number of units that preferred to be mounted (Death Knight Jeritza, Dark Knights Edelgard and Hubert, and Holy Knight Bernadetta) and only one flying unit properly leveled to be in my final party (Dark Flier Constance). Moreover, while Crimson Flower chapter 18 does not have as many Pegasus Knights as some earlier maps, I remained ill-equipped for them. I had one bow-first unit (Sniper Petra) but a number of units that preferred swords (Protagonist, Ferdinand [albeit Ferdinand had lance-breaker, but was classed as a Swordmaster], and Yuri) with no axe-first unit. I ultimately decided to move Bernadetta and Hubert out of mounted classes and slowly grind my way through the map. I succeeded on my second try despite having almost run out of gambits by the final boss. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who may be reading and have not done Crimson Flower yet, but I was happy that Ferdinand, built as a dodge-tank Swordmaster, came through in the clutch against the final boss after having had mixed results for much of my run due to bad RNG luck with his Strength stat. Petra was named final battle MVP after picking off a number of Pegasus Knights, but it felt strange since I could not use her to attack the final boss (she could not take a retaliation attack).
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