I played FE5 almost as a joke so my friends could watch it kill me in real life. I don't even like FE4. I wasn't prepared for this game to own. I wasn't prepared for it to unironically be series Top 3 material. What the fuck.

With a lot of beloved hard games, the refrain is that they're Hard But Fair. (I think it started with God Hand commercials?) Thracia's difficulty probably lives up to the hype, and the game is amazing, but I cannot overstate how much it's not fair. One of the great things is that it's hard to sum up why it's so difficult, because it's not any one main reason; the game is inventively sadistic. Every other chapter it pulls some shit that warrants brand new amendments to the Fantasy Geneva Conventions. In one map you may have to outrun an entire squadron of wyvern riders with Killer Lances who spawn closer to what you're trying to protect than you do and you're on slow ass mountain terrain. In another, you want to turn a bunch of powerful enemies into friendly green units by allowing them to talk to specific other green units, with no ability to steer either party toward each other, and also the enemies who are still red will immediately start butchering the turncoats. The game is an endless bag of absurd, dirty tricks being played on you personally, and it's honestly both hilarious to fail and immensely satisfying to finally solve the puzzle.

There are also a ton of little mechanical quirks, some of them infamous and none of which would be back-breaking on their own, but the cumulative effect requires your entire strategic mentality to be completely different from in any other game in the series. For example, most stats cap at 20 for every class, and a lot of your units honestly have pretty great growth rates, so that drastically changes the value of something as basic as EXP. The game actually has a Konami Code-style cheat you can use on the main menu to literally double everyone's EXP gains, but there's debate over whether it actually makes the game any easier. You gain items over the course of the game that increase a unit's growths, so everyone ballooning two thirds of the way to level cap before you get most of them can actually kind of fuck you. Love it or hate it, I think it takes an incredibly interesting game to make a unilateral gigantic level boost potentially disadvantageous to the player. Also, you've probably heard that healing can miss; that's not actually one of your bigger problems (though it can really come in clutch to ruin an entire plan sometimes), but it is an extremely funny indicator of the game's overall attitude towards the player. There are a lot of other innovations you don't hear about as oddities because they simply stuck around; weird and brutal as it is, the game feels shockingly modern (or I suppose I should say "like a 2000s-era Fire Emblem") compared to the other Shouzou Kaga games.

But the most important feature, and another one you've probably heard of, is the capture mechanic--you can actually nonlethally disable enemies (and steal all their shit)! But something you might not pick up on until you're playing the game is that it's basically your only source of income. You get a pretty typical number of items from treasure chests and villages, sure, but enemies never drop anything when killed, shop prices are fucking exorbitant and you NEVER, at any point in the game, get any money in any way other than selling items. There aren't even gems or anything that exist only to sell for a lot, everything you can sell is potentially useful in its own right and you get peanuts compared to how much it would cost to buy the same thing. It's not a minor or optional mechanic; if you like it when your army has weapons, you need to be capturing on an extremely regular basis. It makes for a really crunchy, interesting in-game economy where you're basically always tense about your equipment.

Luckily, the other really important thing about capturing is that it's really fucking hard and dangerous. You have to defeat the enemy anyway to capture them; you can't do it on enemy phase so it often requires some tricky baiting; some units can almost never do it at all because you need higher constitution than the enemy; doing it with other enemies around will definitely get someone killed because you have severe stat penalties while holding a captive; and worst of all, using the Capture command instead of Attack also gives you stat penalties. It turns out fighting with edged weapons is harder when you're trying not to kill the fucker, what's up with that?

This also means the better the loot, the harder it is to get, since rare and valuable items tend to be carried by stronger enemies who are deeper behind enemy lines. You're basically running a cost-benefit analysis every time you see something you really want; you may have to stick your entire head in a blender to get it, but can you afford to pass it up? The game is hard right now, but it's not gonna get any easier later on, especially if you're not building a stockpile of exactly this kind of resource. That extra Warp staff will be a huge lifeline. Did I mention that the guy is using it every turn, so by the time you get to him and take it, having run fucking pell-mell through an obstacle course of siege weaponry and cavalry that overextended you for the rest of the map, it has one cast left? The game is littered with honey pots like this, where it dangles something you DESPERATELY want in front of you, then makes it so difficult and costly to get that you don't realize it's not worth it until you're already hard committed. I hear you laughing at me, Kaga, you weird chauvinist fuck! This still doesn't make you cool!

So obviously I'm an idiot masochist, but there is more than pain here. Counterintuitively, for how much you're suffering, you get to fuck around with some of the strongest units in the series. (Relative to the game around them. Their stats cap at 20 they should not fight FE10 units--) You form the kind of attachment to characters like Mareeta and Asbel, to name just a couple of the more extreme examples, that you can normally only get with people you've ACTUALLY been to war with. They're your fucking rock. A fixed point you can rely on when you need them most.

It also helps that, in moderation, you get to be just as sadistic as the game. I know I just spent a small novel hyping up the scarcity of resources, but the thing about the game making you fight like hell to get anything is that it can make a lot more crazy stuff technically available. You won't get out of this map with a Brave Sword, a Sleep staff, a promotion item and two Silver weapons--but with some elbow grease you can probably get a couple of them, and that actually gives you a lot of freedom. Your toolkit is both limited and potentially really potent, and sometimes you realize you have the right combination of staves or something to completely ratfuck a challenge that looked impossible at first glance, as a reward for having worked hard earlier in the game. That's a rare, amazing feeling.

Okay, this is a stupid sentence but it's my review and it can be stupid if I want: I haven't played Pathologic, but FE5 kind of makes me feel the way people describe Pathologic. I mean, I wouldn't call them similar games, the narrative here is not exactly high art, but it's a story about being a scrappy underdog rebel faction fighting a huge empire and the gameplay genuinely commits to that feeling. It is impossible to forget while playing this game that everything is working against you, you have nothing but what you can desperately claw out of somebody else's hands, and you cannot win by fighting fair. Thracia really is a harrowing game, but inside the infamous struggle is something that sticks with you; something bold, fascinating, and incredibly rewarding.

although Saias being arbitrarily immune to Sleep and Silence in chapter 22 is fucking--

I hate the sentence "style without substance". Style can be substance of its own. But this game is style without thought. It's a bunch of cool visuals thrown around without any thematic link or coherent aesthetic, tied together by shitty combat and the most masturbatory writing I've ever seen in a videogame. I've played games that are art. As much as Roadkill tries, it just isn't one. There's some interesting concepts, but playing through the game feels like wading through muck.

Also the dev is a POS and possibly just a straight-up criminal so uh.