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Well, I might as well vote and get my two cents in.

Best: FE 7 - the Dread Isle chapter

I believe that it has a good use of the "fog" element, and gives us a reason to call this place "Dread Isle." It's supposed to be dangerous, so dangerous that ships don't sail there. Uhai and the rest of his forces pose a significant threat, and it can be hard to scout them out unless you use torches strategically. It challenges the player while adding to the atmosphere of this part of the story. This chapter lets you know that things just got real.

Worst: FE 10 - One Survives

As Tiki said - the Fog of War is really just there to add fake difficulty to this chapter. And then having the Black Knight alongside Micaiah just encourages the player to abuse him (I fell into that trap on my first run, and I'm sure many others did too.) I'm sure this plot point could have been done without actually making it a playable chapter. I know that chapters are supposed to have their own limitations, but this one's just ridiculous.

Sooo fog of war is definitely going to be subjective material to talk about. Personally I find Fog of War one of the most interesting aspects of the FE series. Now before I choose the best which obviously will be 14x and for a lot of the reasons that Tiki pointed out. I’d like to at least talk over a few of the other FoW chapters I really think stand out and still have some elements that work very well.

For FE7, I’d consider “The Living Legend” chapter a good Fog of War chapter. Normally when you’d play it on normal mode it’s generally a desert chapter that restricts movement except for magic users, or flying units. Thieves actually do very well here because they can find items easily and they have that bonus field seeing vision. But HHM completely adds upon it using the sandstorm as the fog effect which is actually an a pretty cool concept. You have not only have idea where the enemy’s position is but Pent is all the way on the other side trying to fend off units on his own, at least until you get to him. Eventually there is some wyvern riders, shamans, and mages that re-spawn for quite awhile right near Pent. The challenge really comes in whether Pent will survive because while he is a fantastic pre-promote he will eventually take quite a bit of damage if you don‘t help him as soon as possible. So you have to utilize your fliers and magic users to their fullest potential to get through this which is a good challenge. In the normal modes he can totally take care of enemies easily.

FE6 generally had seize the throne objectives, but I also think it had a great Fog of war chapter which If memory serves was chapter 14. It’s also a desert chapter with Fog of War and of course there is items scattering the whole place to find. But with some differences like it’s actually a pretty vast map to traverse through. So there leaves bishops hiding in the dark trying to Silence and Sleep your units. Some Wyverns riders/lords hiding in the dark here and there. The only new units you have with you is Sophia(And everyone here should know about her at this point) and Cecilia who is actually not that bad of a Val Kyrie than most people give her credit for. And during a certain number of turns two groups of Brigands will appear exactly at the bottom south of the map. There’s only about 25 turns or less in order to finish the map if you want that Gaiden chapter. I believe like when it’s nearing 20 turns the fog eventually clears out. I really like how it’s done here to try and give that player a sense to accomplish that goal as quick as possible. And regular units and mounts have a bit of a challenge keeping up with the group, so I like what it’s trying to do in the long run.

Chapter 11B in FE8 I thought was a Fog of war good map too. There’s monsters in the mist and flying ones at different points of the map. So there’s that feeling of being unaware of when they’ll strike the ships while you’re traveling on board. And of course saving L’ Arachel and Dozla on the third ship. I thought there’s some challenge to this one at least.


I’m not really that crazy over FE10 in terms of its story structure but it actually had some good maps here and there. Chapter 3-6 is one of them where you take over the dawn brigade and they’re all fighting against the laguz in the dark. I like that there's a fear factor involved especially when facing against hidden laguz. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite FoW map but I like the ideas being used here.

But anyways, so now onto FE5. I think Thracia 776 uses Fog of war in general for the most part very, very well! The atmosphere is just so dark and moody that just gives an overall different feel from the other FE games that had FoW maps. It’s not perfect by any means and that’s apparent in chapter 24x.(I’ll talk about that map at a later time.) Tiki pretty much said what I liked about 14x. It actually uses fog of war in the best ways. There’s civilians that you have to protect while Dark mages with rewarping staves appear out of nowhere. The civilians appear one at a time all the way in the bottom so they can be easy targets for the Pegasus knights that lurk in the shadows above the mountains ranges. So if none of your units are there to help they’ll be taken away for good. It could be anywhere on the map. And I think that’s why I feel this is the best FoW map. You have no idea what to even expect what’s coming, even with the use of torches/torch staves. It’s like you’re trying to struggle for survival the whole entire chapter. And you want those civilians to stay alive since you’ll free S. drinks.(Might as well grab those freebies right?) And yeah it's also an escape chapter so leaving as soon as possible is your main priority.

I haven’t really decided on a worst yet so I’ll make my decision on that later on.

Alright I have reached a decision on the worst. After doing a bit of thinking, I feel that chapter 1-9 from FE10 should earn this spot. Yeah, I actually think this map is worst than 24x. Simply because it's a pointless map that doesn't go anywhere. All you have is micaiah but what's really the point in using her if you overuse the Black Knight? And he is pretty OP as heck so there's not really much to it at all really. At first I thought chapter 24x right away, but I felt that at least something new was tried with it. There is at least some understanding and a connection to the game. I honestly really like the scenes besides the actual map which is total BS. And yes, it's a terrible map in the worst ways you can think of possible. I'm not talking about the glitches in the english patch because that's a whole other issue altogether. The map itself is trial and error or you'll need a map which does help.

FE10 Chapter 3-6.

It's actually one a number of us have been praising. It IS particularly harder the first time you play RD though.

Best: Arrive in X turns
This was a toss-up between Arrive and Defend, but I chose Arrive because I think it involves more risk on the part of the player. If you're too careful, you run the risk of not being able to arrive in time, but rushing forward can put you in too much danger. In Defend chapters, you can stay in the same place and defend choke points, so once you get the right characters in the right place, it can become a matter of waiting until the timer runs out. Arrive requires the player to advance into the enemy's territory, providing more tension as there's a time limit and the worry that you may leave your units exposed without good planning.

Worst: Survive X turns
This is probably one of the easiest victory conditions to satisfy in my opinion, especially if you don't care about getting enemy drops or visiting villages or whatnot. Just take your toughest units, place them in a fortified spot, and laugh as the enemy throws themselves against your wall of tank characters.
When given the option, I would always go for the more difficult path in these kinds of chapters. I just don't think that survival alone is good enough for victory. (Not the best choice of words, but I can't think of how else to say it.)

Note: I hardly ever played these chapters on anything other than Easy mode, so they may have more merit at harder difficulties. I'm basing this vote on my own experiences.

Best: Survive. For me, I found these to be the best. You've got enemies coming at you for sometime, and you gotta defend yourself. It's all about making sure you got your utility and defenses to ensure your safety. And I may be crazy? But this is a good reason why I make sure to have a couple tanky members while having a support healer from afar.

Worst: Siding with FD on Seize. While FE4 did have many different targets to seize to progress things, I feel that it also had a different goal. You actually had armies to defeat with this. But FE1/11/12/3? Same with FE6? It was just one map and that was it. FE4 had a few maps, with many different targets. So you had the different objectives.

Best: Escape. Originally I was unsure on if I wanted to vote Escape best or give the nod to something else since the chapters are either extremely unforgiving (FE5) or way too forgiving (FE9/10). But I think that the need to escape with all of your characters with the Lord escaping ending the chapter opens up a lot of chapter possibilities, especially at its most unforgiving. Not to mention, they're great for drama through gameplay as well as story.

Worst: Defeat Boss. I agree that seize chapters tend to be sort of samey, especially since some FE games are all seize chapters. Seize chapters usually involve a boss to kill, though. So you could interpret defeat boss chapters as one part of a seize chapter, and an objective that can be very easy to accomplish. Granted, in a defeat boss chapter the boss doesn't necessarily have to be standing on a seize tile. It could run around and ruin your day in various ways, but it's easy to have a single character just off him and move on with your life, especially if the chapter isn't very big and it's easy to just bypass all of the enemies and clever things the developers might have set up and just kill the boss.

Best: Escape. Like with what Tiki said, the way it's done in FE5 really brings such a dramatic tone to it all. I really like how creative the escape chapters are done in the game. One of my favorites in particular is chapter 6 where you're pretty much rushing towards the before to escape from manster and away from Reidrick's forces coming after you. Then at a certain point if you wait too long, this really powerful LV.20 swordsman named Galzus appears and this music starts playing.



The music itself really shows the drama and eerie feeling(Hence why it's my favorite track from FE5. Though the soundtrack in general is pretty amazing imo) that if you don't escape, THINGS.WILL.GO.WRONG.

But heck, even the quote each character says when they leave the map is really cool and adds more suspense to it all. And if they don't escape well... that's a secret. Heh heh heh.... twisted

Except for chapter 24X the developers went waaaay too far with that chapter in general but throwing in an escape is just random.


Worst: Defeat boss. To be honest, I had a difficulty deciding between the two because both conditions are really the same in all actuality. FE6 did have so much repetition in seizing the throne that much is true. But one could argue that FE4 was more of so seizing forts and they were grand scale maps. But then again they did have a point to them moving the plot forward and that did make it more interesting in that sense. FE3(Super famicom) and FE1(Nes) on the were all about seizing the throne in whatever way you could look at it. I guess they are older games so it's understandable that there's not much variety to the conditions. But I don't really feel there's much to defeat boss as a condition. Sure there's some tough bosses here and there statwise, but for the most part they're not very hard to by in most of the maps. I think there's some merit to seizing the throne. Like rushing towards the throne to get a gaiden chapter does have some challenge to it.