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The story
A discussion has broken out on 5ch’s Hardware & Industry (Geha) board over the burden of completionist elements in the latest Fire Emblem title. It started with reports that items and growth/training elements needed for Part 3 actually get locked in the moment you clear your first playthrough, with no way to go back and reacquire them later. Since the development team had previously explained that “no matter what order you play in, we’ve made sure no irreversible elements appear,” voices rose pointing out the discrepancy with this system. On the thread, opinions clashed between “trying to be a completionist is just asking for trouble” and “a system that contradicts the official explanation is a garbage system,” with defenders and critics continuing to go back and forth.
What people said
It's exhausting getting told you're missing this or that.
Just play it casually and don't sweat it.
I played casually, then realized I was missing this and that and it was basically mandatory, and redoing it all is such a hassle that I ended up thinking, "ugh, I don't even need to clear this game anymore."
Turns out it gets locked in based on your first playthrough, so you HAD to do it right the first time.
Come on, make your excuses now, you armchair fanboy.
The ones complaining about that are just out-of-touch old-timers.
If you're after the optimal route, that's the opposite of a perfect playthrough.
Going for full completion IS the deep-grind content.
If you care about time efficiency, just steamroll through with easy overpowered characters and gear, right?
The game's balanced so you can clear it easily with just the three starting characters anyway.
None of it's actually required, though.
The less you've collected, though, the harder Part 3 gets.
Is that really a problem? Just set the difficulty to Normal/Casual then.
trying to do it all in one playthrough
is just pointless and unreasonable.
It's so exhausting I don't even want to do a second playthrough.
It's not about whether you CAN clear it — it's just a pain.
If it's just an inconvenience, then it's not exactly mandatory, is it?
And people were already losing it over Wolverine, too.
That's exactly why I said it's too much of a hassle and I haven't bothered.
If you haven't even done it, then nothing's actually been a hassle for you.
This is straight-up a garbage system.
Can that still be changed as long as you haven't entered Part 3 yet?
and you just redo the chapter from the start, so you supposedly can't get permanently stuck.
Maybe people who reset every time someone dies just haven't noticed this.
But any characters you recruited or classes you unlocked during that chapter all get reset too, right? Is that really how it works?
If chasing a perfect playthrough is what's making the game painful for you,
that's putting the cart before the horse — I have to ask what you're even playing for.
It's fine if there are some irreversible elements.
Maybe this just isn't the game for perfectionists.
The fact that this turned out to be a flat-out lie is kind of rough, though…
Yokota:
Basically, we've designed it so that no matter what order you play in, the way you progress won't create any irreversible elements — so please feel free to enjoy whichever route you like.
It's not even on the strategy guide sites.
This is a phenomenon that stayed hidden precisely because the game takes so long to clear.
Seriously, armchair players who haven't even touched it should just stay quiet.
So basically you want to clear the game with every single protagonist AND do extra replays on top of that?
That's content meant for AFTER you've already gotten at least 200 hours of enjoyment out of this game — it's there to squeeze out even more fun.
At that point you clearly love this game.
Even if it's a fun game, a garbage system is still a garbage system.
I don't get why you can't just admit there's even one bad element in it.
How many times are you gonna write the same thing, lol.
I wish it had something like Xenoblade's visions that warn you an item will be needed later, or a feature that announces at the start of a chapter when a short-window quest is about to appear.
The game's too long to stay on high alert every single turn.
It's a game built around multiple playthroughs anyway, so it's fine.
Just grab it on your second or third run.
The items get locked in on your FIRST playthrough, though.
Armchair players, just stay quiet.
So can it still be undone as long as you haven't reached Part 3 yet? That's what it comes down to.
https://imgur.com/a/rgU4Lh8
It's not locked in — how many hundreds of hours have you even put in?
And if you want it carried over into your later save data too, you have to redo the entire route (dozens of hours).
Isn't that pretty common in other games too, lol.
That's not a "redo," that's a second playthrough, right? You're phrasing it that way on purpose to make it sound worse.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
At the heart of this topic is the tension — common throughout the Fire Emblem series — between “replay elements” and “irreversible elements.” In a prior interview, the development side (Mr. Yokota) explained that the game was “made so that no irreversible elements appear no matter what order you play in,” but on the thread, reports have surfaced that items and classes needed for Part 3 actually get locked in once you clear your first playthrough, with no way to change them afterward. The fact that it isn’t even covered on strategy guide sites appears to be because the game takes so long to clear that few players have verified it firsthand. Opinion on the thread is split between “trying to be a completionist is unreasonable” and “the official explanation doesn’t match the actual system,” and neither side is entirely off base. What’s easy for readers to misunderstand is that this lock-in isn’t a “bug” but an existing, built-in system, and that it’s hard to notice during a normal (non-completionist) playthrough.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry/Geha) thread “I’ve lost the will to clear FE, it’s just too exhausting.”
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