Fire Emblem Jugdral/YMMV

Genealogy of the Holy War

• Anticlimax Boss: Julius, the final boss, if you use the plot-dictated method involving Julia and Naga. If you want to do anything else, the final boss becomes an MK Walker where he's not a full-on SNK Boss. It is still entirely possible to kill him without Naga, but it requires a lot of patitence, as you can only do a tiny bit of damage every turn (20 to be exact, assuming Seliph's attacks hit), and he regenerates 15 HP every turn (he's immune to skills and criticals thanks to his Nihil). And hope that he doesn't decide to cast Meteor on whoever you have healing Seliph: he's known for charging (Charge or Duel, a skill that causes combat to act as though another "attack" command was issued, and it can proc on itself, causing combat to last until death in some cases...) those in his meteor range to death (he also has Wrath so if he's at 35 HP and decides he's gonna meteor someone, say a quick prayer for that character, cause he/she is dead).
  • A straight example on the other hand is Manfroy. For someone who was effectively the Big Bad for most of the story, he certainly isn't very impressive. He has the same equipment as every other Dark Bishop before him and statwise he isn't any better than, say, Ishtar, so any good unit can easily take him down on their own.
• Ass Pull: It is known that Julia is Deirdre's daughter and has major Naga blood, so this is averted when she gets the Naga Tome at the eleventh hour... however, it's not explained as to why the Naga Tome is superior to the Loptous Tome (as it can pierce right through its defensive powers), when it's made known that light and dark magic are on even ground in terms of power in this game.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Even nowadays that it isn't the only Fire Emblem with breeding mechanics anymore, people usually still know what you're referring to if you call it "the one with the incest."
• Complete Monster: The game is really good at this.
  • Queen Hilda of Freege tortures and kills Tailtiu, then brutally abuses Tine (and if in any case Tailtiu died during the first generation, Hilda would instead torture and kill Tailtiu's little sister Ethnia; then abuses the hell out of Tine's substitute/Ethinia's daughter Linda), goes on child-hunting for fun (and that's when her husband Bloom, Tailtiu's brother, had second thoughts of child-hunting despite being an overall bastard as well. She also manipulates her and Bloom's Dark Magical Girl daughter Ishtar into marrying the guy she loves, Julius, solely because Hilda wants to use said marriage to get more power for herself.
  • Bishop Manfroy is responsible, directly or indirectly, for almost everything that happens in the plot, to the point that he's pretty much the game's Big Bad.
    • First Generation: he manipulated various rulers and dukes, causing the war against Isaac by using Duke Reptor of Freege to assassinate Ira's father King Mananan, while also manipulating King Chagall into killing his father and sending his envoy Sandima to stir trouble in Verdane. During this time, he worked primarily with Arvis, whom he was blackmailing with knowledge of Arvis's Loputo blood in addition to his Fala heritage, thus poisoning him with hatred and envy. Later, he kidnaps and brainwashes Sigurd's wife Deirdre (and in one of the mangas, he outright mind rapes her and laughs about it), then manipulated her and the emotionally-weakened Alvis so they'd marry and have children who could be used as Loputo vessels (and they're half-siblings, by the way). And as the cherry on top, he killed Levin of Silesia with his own hands in the Battle of Belhalla (with Forseti becoming a Dragon Ex Machina to let him escape death).
    • Second Generation: a while before it started, he gave Prince Julius the Loputo tome, causing him to become the vessel for the Dark God and kill his mother Diadora while attempting to kill his twin sister Julia (who Diadora is just barely able to save with her dying breath), shaping him into the horrible rival we'd meet later, and also attacked his pregnant daughter and his son-in-law purely because they broke his Parental Marriage Veto, killing him and driving her into insanity, which would cause his soon-to-be granddaughter Sara to be pissed off at him forever. And after all of that? He organized and helped commit the horrible child hunts already mentioned, and later he kidnapped Julia (who had been taken in by Lewyn, and later by Seliph's army) and brainwashed her so she'd become his and Julius's Apocalypse Maiden. Go. To. HELL. Manfroy.
  • Duke Danann isn't much better. He runs the entire country of Isaach straight into the ground by the time the second generation starts.
• Crack Pairing: In Genealogy of the Holy War, you can potentially pair any available male with any available female, but it'll take some work for the couples who don't interact in the main story.
  • Once the player understands how the romance and inheritance mechanics work, and they start pairing people up for items and stats rather than for their in-story relationships, a lot of the resultant pairings are like this.
• Cult Classic: This is the only sub-franchise that never enjoyed big international exposure (while Roy's tale was never released, he did make an appearance in Super Smash Bros.) and as of yet hasn't been updated to a more recent generation. However, it remains to have a strong following.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: This timeline in general, Genealogy of Holy War amongst titles, and Ayra.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • If you take account on characterization, not gameplay prowess (in which any pair is fair game), you're more likely to see the pairs of Lex/Ayra, Azelle/Tailtiu and Finn/Lachesis amongst fanarts that tried to pair the ladies with their prospect husbands (to compare with some other suitors: Chulainn is often forgotten since he's kind of optional, Lewyn already has a canon wife according to Thracia 776 (Erinys), Dew is typically used a pick-up father for any remaining pairing that has a unmounted sword-wielding child, and Beowolf is something of a Base Breaking Character). Because of Azelle/Tailtiu, Edain's Fan-Preferred Couple tends to boil down between either Jamke or Midayle, both of them not having a clear lead yet. Note: some of them got used for the Mitsuki Oosawa manga, which also further boosted the preference for these couples.
  • In the Second Generation, you have fans pairing Seliph with Tine due to the couple drawing many parallels to Sigurd and Deirdre, which Tine lampshades herself in her lovers conversation with Seliph in the final chapter. Since Seliph's journey is supposed to be a reconstruction of Sigurd's, Tine rejecting Seliph's offer to stay back at home from the final battle seems to be coming full circle considering a very similar situation happened to his parents that obviously did not end well.
• Foe Yay: Ayra's fight with Lex in the Oosawa manga reeked with this, not helping that the two's respective kindgoms were at war with each other, yet they still develop their relationship despite of it. Some might see this as a precedent for two more axe male and sword female pairings; the optional Hector and Lyn and the set-in-stone Bartre and Karla, both from The Blazing Blade.
• Franchise Original Sin: For some folks. It was the first game to feature character pairing as a major mechanic (and even a story beat), which even in the 90s led to quite a bit of "shipping wars" in Japan, and pretty much forced The Binding Blade onwards to at least have the "support" mechanic (often explicitly romantic) and later served as the basis for Awakening and Fates using versions of the same pairing system, leading to the birth of names like "Shipping Emblem" and "Waifu Simulator". It still makes perfect sense for this game, but there are very old-school fans who feel it began a trend of drifting the series away from epic tales of conflict to the more "shipping"-focused stories of the 21st century.
• Game Breaker: If you play your cards right with the pairings in the first generation, you can end up with a whole army of Game Breakers. Justified, since most people wouldn't have a clue on their first time through that pairing people up was actually extremely important, never mind which pairings were good or bad, and the game doesn't take it easy on you.
  • Special mention goes to any magic user who inherits Forseti. Especially Sety or Arthur.
  • Lex is a goldmine of Disc One Nukes: he comes at turn 2 of the very start of the game with Paragon (which doubles experience gain), gets a Brave Axe near the end of Chapter 1 if you know where to look, and is arguably the best father in the game, as he passes down his Paragon skill to both of his children, along with minor Neir blood and solid growths. He's one of the biggest ways to make both generations much easier.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Despite being a fan-favorite among English speaking Fire Emblem communities, Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu gave the Jugdral games the lowest review scores of the Fire Emblem series.
  • Famitsu might not have liked them, but Genealogy of the Holy War was the best-selling Fire Emblem game ever in Japan. Thracia 776 didn't sell very well, but then again, it was released for the SFC in 1999 and in regular cartridge form in 2000, being the second to last SNES game. (for reference, the Nintendo 64 debuted in 1996).
  • Which makes it more of a 8.8 then.
  • No, Japan loves it too.
• It Was His Sled: The ending of the First Generation in which Sigurd and almost everyone he's with dies seems to be known by everyone now.
• Jerkass Woobie: It's not clear how Woobie-licious Arvis is, but it's undeniable that the man's life sucked balls ever since he was a child. His portrayal in the Oosawa manga is quite sympathetic too. Read Chapters 8 and 11 to see how.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I kill Tailtiu for Linda". Literally, as Tailtiu must die childless if you want to get Linda instead of Tine.
  • And Ferry? She. Has. FURY!!
• Moe: For a dark game, there's a lot of adorable girls to go around, most blatantly Silvia, Tailtiu and then her daughter Tine.
• Moral Event Horizon: Arvis brings the brainwashed and amnesiac Deirdre in front of her husband Sigurd to taunt him, just before he kills Sigurd and his entire army. And shortly beforehand, Travant assaults and slaughters Quan's entire army in a desert. The catch is, Travant's army are flying Wyvern Knights, Quan's army is made up of Cavalry hindered by the desert. Quan's beautiful wife Ethlyn (on whom Travant may have a Villainous Crush on) got killed, her 3-year-old daughter Altena is captured by Travant and is used as a hostage so Quan drops the only thing that could save him: the Gae Bolg. Then Travant killed Quan out of cold blood, and takes Altena and the Gae Bolg to Thracia.
• Narm:
  • As if the narmification of the Battle of Barhera via limited graphic quality wasn't enough, a very antiquated word usage in some fan translations ruins it all over again.

Sigurd: "ARVIS, YOU DASTARD!"

• • It doesn't help that the whole Battle of Belhalla (the incident mentioned above) is represented as tiny little Super-Deformed mages casting Meteor over an equally cutesy army. Wha…?
• Older Than They Think:
  • Genealogy of the Holy War is where the weapon/magic triangle and weapon ranks originate from, although Thracia 776 was the first game to use the "modern" weapon ranking system (ranks from E to A; weapon usage increases the rank). The biggest mechanic of all though is the marriage system that Fire Emblem Awakening cranks Up to Eleven: due to the fact that all of the kids in the second generation had their classes set in stone, only a small selection of fathers are optimal for each child (admit it, are you really going to have Arden be Ced the Sage's father?), so anyone who knew of Fire Emblem Awakening's marriage system first is in for quite a shock should they play Genealogy of the Holy War.
  • At the ending screen, you are given a final grade on your commanding performance which is affected by four stats during the game. One of those stats is affected by how fast you complete a chapter. So, by definition, Genealogy of the Holy War predates Advance Wars by five years in its introduction of the ranking system.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Dismounting in Thracia 776, Knights specializing only in Lances spontaneously losing their ability to use their Weapon of Choice and being forced to use Swords when they get off a horse is completely illogical. This also turns makes all of the Lances acquired Vendor Trash in the later chapters.
• Shipping: It's a game mechanic in Genealogy of the Holy War. Who you pair up determines what characters, with what stats, you get in the second generation. Thus, Ship-to-Ship Combat is about mechanical benefits as much as it is about sex appeal.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Finn and Lachesis are pretty close to an Official Couple. The Oosawa adaptation of Genealogy of the Holy War goes in-depth into the relationship, Finn can have a conversation with Nanna if he's her father, and Thracia 776 drops some very strong hints that he and Lachesis were married before she vanished in the desert. The only thing is that during the time Fin and Lachesis are both playable in Genealogy of the Holy War, they have no love conversations the way other plotted pairings do. It comes off like the writers forgot to put that in there.
  • Many pairings in Fire Emblem 4 can come off as this due to lack of conversation or even hint of any relations.
• That One Boss: All of the Mjolnir users, but the final Ishtar encounter especially (if only because she has the highest stats). The thing gives a meaty bonus to skill and speed, and coupled with its already high might, it's a force to be reckoned with. Still, you better get used to it, because you fight against it FIVE whole times across the game.
• That One Level: Chapter 1 is seen by many as a very difficult level despite being the first non Prologue level. The main setup of the level is that Verdane sends a large wave of Fighters and a few Warriors to attack your castle, meaning you'll need to deploy your army to counter them. However, while that is already difficult since you have only a few sword users, you also have the addition of Dew and Edain, who are attempting to flee the Verdane's main castle, prompting them to send a second smaller army of the same units to kill the two. The level quickly turns into a race to safely get to Edain and Dew before they are swarmed and killed, something that is borderline Guide Dang It because you have to make your movements almost perfectly and rely on forests for extra avoidance. Meanwhile, the first Verdane army consists of a few Warriors with bows, and a mini boss with a Hand Axe, meaning the player is forced to essentially throw Sigurd at the head and pray he doesn't get too badly damaged. If you aren't careful as well, you'll possibly have to kill Ayra if you don't claim Castle Genoa before fighting her, and there is the optional Lex's Brave Axe event that takes a lot of time to complete but give great rewards. Worse yet, after taking Castle Genoa, Elliot will appear off to the top left with a large group of Cavaliers, which might make some players panic and retreat to defend their castle, only for Eldigan's army to arrive and deal with the problem. If Dew and Edain aren't safely within the core of Sigurd's army by then, this can easily lead to their deaths. In general, the level is just way too big with too many things going on at once for some.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Jamke's relevance to the plot largely ends after the first chapter, wherein he defects from Verdane because he can't condone the war his father and brothers are waging. This is a shame, given that Chapters 2 and 3 revolve around Eldigan's own struggles with My Country, Right or Wrong. Given that Jamke had faced the exact same choice, one would expect that he might express some opinion on the situation. It also hurts Jamke that he lacks any major Holy Blood, meaning he lacks any chance to wield a special weapon, and in Genealogy of the Holy War, units without Holy Blood are generally left to the side narratively as well.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy:
  • As armored units, Arden and Hannibal suffer from low Speed and movement in a game infamous for having enormous maps.
  • Do NOT mention wanting to use your high priests as combat units. Ever.
  • Silvia and her children (Lene and Coirpre) aren't well-liked either: forum discussions will practically implore you to kill Silvia or not pair her up and take the substitutes Laylea and Charlot (basically both Lene and Coirpre are going to be garbage in combat no matter who their father is unless Coirpre is Lewyn's son, and Laylea and Charlot come with Charm and Paragon respectively, two skills that make them much better at their non-combat jobs). Lene's star as a character has risen some thanks to Fire Emblem Heroes.
  • Lester is rather infamous among the community, as unless he's given the right setup, he's among one of the weakest units in the entire game. Even with the right father, he has somewhat middling results as he is typically deemed as solely a hit-and-run unit who can be felled quite easily. Some players even ignore using him at all and focus on pairing to make Lana stronger, or even go with his substitute Deimne who is somehow about as good if not better than him.

Thracia 776

• Anticlimax Boss: The final boss is widely considered to be the most pathetic final boss ever. Most other final bosses can be one-shotted because the character (often the main character or someone with a special weapon (i.e. Julia in Genealogy of the Holy War and Tiki or Nagi in Shadow Dragon) has a weapon that almost doubles the damage done to them and bypasses defense entirely. Veld (Beldo/Berdo/Beld), meanwhile... is practically just an Upgraded Mook. You can literally take him out without even using a special weapon or having Leaf lay a finger on him. It's kind of a disappointing end to a Nintendo Hard game.
• Badass Decay: Eyvel is not as useful as in chapter 1-5 once you get her back later.
• Base Breaking Character: Though the fandom is pretty small, fans either hate Marty due to being a Tier-Induced Scrappy, and what little characterization he's given to be a timid coward who easily caves into peer pressure. Others feel he's a Lovable Coward with a gameplay purpose as a packmule, and like his implied relationship with Dagdar.
• Contested Sequel: Fans are rather divided over whether it's an interestingly designed and brutally challenging entry in the series, or an unfair, unplayable mess with horrible mechanics and an underwhelming story.
• Epileptic Trees: It is heavily hinted that Eyvel's Briggid after going amnesiac due to how things turned out on the first half of Genealogy of the Holy War.
  • Word of God says says she actually is Briggid, and that some years after the end of Thracia 776, she recovers her memories and is reunited with the now adult Patty and Faval.
    • Even more: if you save her from being petrified, and Finn is still alive, this triggers a conversation in which Finn does recognize her as Briggid and tells her so. However, Eyvel herself is still amnesiac and denies this.
• Game Breaker:
  • The Pugi is a Disc One Nuke to end all Disc One Nukes; with high might, crit chance, and 1-2 range, it can utterly destroy anyone in its way, and skyrocketed Orsin into Memetic Badass territory.
  • The Crusader Scrolls are pretty much a boxed Nihil with growth boosts. Put enough scrolls on any single unit and they will become absolute monsters.
  • The various warp staves come as close as you can get, allowing a player to abuse Instant Win Condition to get around some of the more difficult chapters.
  • If Olwen is given the Vantage skill and she is equipped with 2x times attack Dire Thunder tomes and is receiving Charm/Support bonuses, she is pretty much invincible unless she faces any enemy with a % chance to deflect or avoid an attack in its totality.
    • The issues when facing %skills can be avoided if you give Olwen the Nihil scroll. If her stats are high enough, then just sit and watch her wipe out her brother's army in chapter 22 with little to no effort.
  • If it is waited until Ilios is obtained, by consuming the Wrath skill on him, it is possible to have a character with a 60% top chance to avoid ANY form of deadly attack whenever he is attacked + the constant chance to counter kill in one hit almost anything (preferably with a magic tome for 1-2 range attack) while having a 20% (25% if using the rare "Thunder Sword) to obtain back the amount of damage dealt to the enemy back to him.
  • Giving Sara the "Sol" scoll makes her a second Ilios, improving her already very high combat quotient to a peak.
  • Mareeta is the only unit that can learn Astra, which is arguably the strongest skill in the game. While Galzus already comes equipped with the skill, he is only playable for the last three maps in the game. Furthermore, Mareeta comes with her own exclusive brave sword that has a critical of 20 and gives her Nihil. Plus, she is one of the few units that has a Pursuit Critical Coefficient of 5, which means her critical hit rate will be multiplied by 5 during a follow up attack. She also comes equipped with Luna, and if you take the harder route for chapters 16-17, then she can obtain sol. When promoted to a swordmaster, she learns Adept, and skills can stack in this game, which means she has the potential to wipe out any unit in one turn.
• Ho Yay:
  • Marty. His ending title is the "Man whom Dagda loved".
  • Asvel seems to have a bit of a crush on Leaf
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Dismounting. Mounted units specializing only in Lances spontaneously losing their ability to use their Weapon of Choice and being forced to use Swords when they get off a horse is completely illogical. While this mechanic also appeared in Mystery of the Emblem, it is not as debilitating there as that game doesn't have the Weapon Triangle and uses the Weapon Level system, which applies to all weapon types instead of having separate ranks for each weapon. This results in all of the acquired Lances becoming Vendor Trash in the later chapters.
  • You aren't allowed to reposition units before entering battle. The order in which they're deployed is based on their position in the unit selection screen, and units selected for one chapter appear at the top of the selection screen for the next chapter.
  • Pavise blocking all damage (Level % based) and Capturing an enemy is somewhat a scrappy mechanic itself (all stats minus luck, Hp, and build are halved during the process of capturing an enemy).
  • The crowning jewel has to be escape chapters in Thracia 776. Leif MUST be the last unit to exit the map. Any of your characters still on the map when Leif leaves are automatically captured by the enemy and cannot rejoin you until a gaiden chapter late in the game. The game does not tell you this beforehand.
  • Thracia 776 is so far the only game in the series where healing Staves can miss. It's telling that mechanic was never used in the series again. Staves can also double-cast in the same way normal double attacks work, but this is a bad thing too, as it can lead to wasting staff uses on healing insignificant amounts of HP.
• That One Sidequest: Amalda is one of the most, if not THE most, frustratingly hard character to recruit in the series.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Quite a few, sadly. As of now, this game's cast are some of the least developed characters in the series, and there are quite a few characters who had plenty of potential. A select few such as Lifis or Mareeta do get their time in the sun, but overall the cast is very flat, and the results of the first "Choose Your Legends" poll reflect this, with it being just behind the original Fire Emblem Gaiden in terms of votes.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Thracia 776 is full of these: there are a lot of units who are generally useless or just plain outclassed by other units with similar abilities. While almost all of them can be made workable with scrolls and skill books, it's generally agreed to be a waste of resources unless you really, really like them for some reason. For example:
  • Ronan, who's an Archer (in a game where bows are arguably the worst physical weapon), joins a chapter after a better-but-still-not-great Archer, Tanya, and has terrible Strength in exchange for better Magic, a stat that's nigh-useless for him because there are no bows that do magic damage. His only real saving grace being some sort of anti-magic unit, but there's units who do that better than him anyway.
  • Marty, who shares a class with the Crutch Character Dagdar, joins at the same time as him, and is completely inferior to him in every meaningful way; his base Speed and Skill are both zero, and he has terrible growths in both areas. He can occasionally come in handy for capturing very early in the game, but even then Finn and Dagdar can do so better.
  • Selfina, whose bases are barely adequate and whose growths are fairly bad, as well as her subordinates who join at the same time, who have even worse bases along with growths that are far from stellar. It doesn't help that two of them, Alva and Cain, are in the largely-redundant Lance Knight class, while Selfina and Robert are Bow Knights, and thus locked to the game's worst weapon type. Selfina can still be worth it for getting a free Brave Bow, which while not unique to her is best equipped to hold it, and the supports she receives from Leif and Glade, (who greatly benefits from a greater than average support bonus) who are among the best support-type characters in the game, but that still requires a large amount of investment that other characters could use.
  • Eda, who joins at the exact same time as her far-more-useful brother. He starts out promoted, while she doesn't, and her bases are considerably worse than his as a result; the only stats she beats him in are Magic (and by only one point) and Luck. To make it worse, his growths are better than her in almost every area too, she has no skills to even the playing field, and he has access to a weapon, the Dragon Lance, while she gets nothing to compensate. She also has to compete not only with him, but also with Karin, who has similar bases and growths but joins significantly earlier, and Misha, who joins a little later but also has better bases and growths. She's not truly useless, but compared to the other fliers available she's fairly redundant.
  • Troude, who's widely agreed upon to be less useful than most of the other Myrmidon/Swordmaster/Mercenary units. He's not necessarily bad, having competent bases and adequate growths. However, said bases and growths are very similar to Shiva's, and compared to Shiva's earlier jointime and useful skill, Machyua's great promotion and eventual axe access, or Mareeta's crazy growths, powerful skills and unique weapon, he offers little that can't be done better by someone else. He also has the lowest PCC of the above, at 1, and his skill is also made completely redundant by the passive effect of the scrolls, unless you don't like using them for some reason.
  • Shannam, who's yet another Swordmaster in a game full of them, has completely terrible bases for his late jointime, and a PCC of 0, making him the worst Swordmaster even compared to Troude. Of course, since he's a Joke Character, this is to be expected, and he does have a niche use thanks to his Bargain skill that lets him buy items for half price, as well as eventually teaching Mareeta Astra.
  • Subverted with Leif, whom one would expect to qualify for his Master of None base stats, unimpressive growths, and largely one-sided support bonuses. However, the Thracia 776 metagame heavily favors access to skills, personal weapons, and innate qualities over the aforementioned traits: to this end, Leif becomes far more favorable with his personal Light Brand, which he possesses from the start and allows him to attack on the magical end; the Adept ability, which allows him to attack twice as often as normal; and leadership stars, which improves the hit/dodge rate of all playable characters on the field. Despite his support bonuses being one-sided in favor of the other characters, there are a lot of characters whom receive these bonuses from being in close proximity of him, enhancing his support capabilities alongside his leadership stars. Ultimately, Leif is considered an invaluable asset to players less so as a fighter in his own right, but a Support Party Member with surprising capability in defending himself, with his forced deployment on each chapter (and immunity to the Fatigue mechanic) a blessing, rather than a detriment. Many Character Tiers place him near the top of the list, with even the most unfavorable rankings considering him merely below-average, rather than outright abysmal.