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  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn has a level near the end of the game where you have to fight dozens of dragons to make your way to the very powerful king of Goldoa. Their brute force and numbers makes up for their terrible strategy and poor luck, and they feature both physical and magic attacks. Unless you use the battle save (unavailable in Hard and less than fully honorable at any difficulty), one mistake can cost hours of work.
    • The key to this is to use Kurthanaga, the dragon prince. Despite his low starting stats and speed, none of the other dragons aside from the boss will attack him in return. Meaning not only can you protect most of your units, but with the right planning he can gain at least 20 or so levels. The main bonus of this is how useful he will be against the later final bosses.
    • There's also one earlier in the game (Chapter 3-13) where you have to play as under-leveled characters fighting against a nearly endless wave of laguz. Especially egregious because Ike, the best unit in the game to which everything falls in two hits, is the enemy boss. You have to rely upon mostly brain-dead ally units to do the dirty work for you, and only one of them, (the one referred to by fans as the "3-13 Archer") actually puts up a fight. There were several joke topics on Game FAQs about how "3-13 Archer" was the best character in the game.
      • Don't forget that Soren might have a Blizzard tome by now, which not only allows him to attack from half the map away and probably kill anyone who isn't being rescued, but waste a really good tome on units that you don't want to kill.
      • At least 3-13 is redeemed (somewhat) by the Crowning Music of Awesome it plays. 4-3 doesn't have quite this much luck. Sure, it's probably the least scrappy of the Fire Emblem desert levels (which, given how bad they always seem to be, isn't saying much)... but then try playing it your first time through without a guide. You won't realize that Sothe's ultimate weapon and the Dragonfoe scroll (both of which are EXTREMELY helpful in Endgame) are buried here, much less where. You won't know to send Micaiah to the far east (which is quite counterintuitive, by the way) to get Stefan. You won't know that you need to keep the boss from being the last enemy you kill because there's a Laguz Gem (also EXTREMELY helpful in Endgame) buried at his position. And you won't know that you have to hurry to gather kills before the Black Knight shows up and annihilates all the enemies in his path. Yeah, in case you didn't get the message, that level is a MASSIVE Guide Dang It.
      • Chapter 1-5 in hard mode falls squarely under this for one simple reason: Jill. Also known as your "ally", who you have no control over, and who will grant you a Nonstandard Game Over if she dies...with A.I. that seems completely suicidal. And she starts a good distance ahead of your team, so even if you rush your entire army straight to her position, she'll still get a guaranteed chance to screw you over.
      • Chapter 4-5 in Radiant Dawn: the one with hordes of feral laguz coming at you, swamp that lowers movement rate everywhere, and a boss that would summon four more enemies every single turn, and, if you got close to him, would teleport away. At least it's a mage boss.
        • Although that one is somewhat redeemed by being the single most experience-rich map in the game. Buy everyone some extra weapons, fight defensively and let the hordes come to you, and soak the levels up like a sponge...
    • Chapter 23 of Path of Radiance and chapter 3-11 of Radiant Dawn. Pitfall traps and enemy ballistae to take out your fliers. The latter is made at least marginally more palatable by the fact that dragon-riders no longer count as fliers for the purpose of determining weaknesses, but is turned back around by the many enemies using Shine Barriers to block the only path available to ground-bound units (other than being carried over by a flier) for a number of turns. You know, ground-bound units like Ike, who has to capture the boss's position to end the chapter?
  • Any Fog of War chapter in any game is met with groans of disgust, but "Battle Before Dawn" in The Sword of Flame has a reputation for being particularly sucktastic, especially in hard mode.
    • To elaborate: there are three different AI allies whom you need to rescue, and they are in the bottom left, center, and right. One is the prince, who at least has the sense to hide and use Elixirs. The other two are Nino the Dark Magical Girl, who will get killed by any physical attack, and Jaffar, who starts surrounded by enemy forces and can get killed by a couple bad rolls. To top it all off, the boss (Ursula) will move to get the player if they get too close to her and has the long-range Bolting tome, which will kill weakened units or the aforementioned Nino and the prince. While Nino can be somewhat easily dealed with since she only has to fight a Monk and therefore the player can recruit and then hand her to another character easily, Jaffar will be MUCH harder to reach for, and getting too close to Ursula before Nino's recruited can undo the player's plans...
      • Even worse, there are two treasure rooms, each one holding absolutely fabulous treasure (one has a consumable item that permanently increases a unit's movement range by one, and another is an equippable item that removes a flying unit's crippling arrow weakness). However, the enemy starts much closer to those treasure rooms, and deploys their own thieves to steal the treasure for themselves. So, in addition to needing to defend all three NPCs, the players also have to fight flawlessly in order to get to the thieves (who will likely have stolen the treasures before the players get there) and kill them to get the treasures before they escape off the map. (There IS a way to neutralize the thieves, however: giving a magic unit a Bolting tome that the group gained in the previous chapter and have him/her use it on them, after a thief or a character with a Torch item/staff uncovers the exact trap where all the thieves come from)
      • To add an extra grain of salt into the wounds, in Hector's mode, the enemies sent to kill Jaffar all have Swordreavers (and some have Swordslayers, just for an extra "fuck you" to the gamer) which reverse the weapon triangle, putting Jaffar into a massive disadvantage at the beginning. Sometimes, one just has to restart because the game wanted him dead. Hope you got a flying unit/paladin at the ready!
      • Also, regarding the prince and his Elixirs; he will not use them unless his health is below 50%. When he has 20 HP to start with. In other words, if a Fighter attacks him and only does, say 6 damage, it would be WORSE than if it nearly killed him, because he won't heal the damage back! If a player doesn't have a healer with a Physic close enough to him... uh...
  • The Sword of Seals has one late in the game. Chapter 21: The Sword Of Seals. Let's see, we've got reinforcements arriving in groups of four, and as many as five of these groups arrive on certain turns early on. Most of these are Dragon Riders/Dragonlords, one of the toughest classes out there. It's also a really big level. Then once you get close to the boss, you've got another really powerful enemy character showing up, one that all indications thus far have shown might be recruitable. He isn't. He won't attack you, mercifully, but he and his units will get in your way if you decide not to engage them in battle. Luckily, reports that you have to leave him alive to get to the Gaiden Level aren't true. Then there's a boss whose HP breaks the usual cap and who also has insane strength and defense. Here's hoping your mages have either been loaded with Angelic Robes (which you can actually buy in the secret store in this game) or have developed high dodge rates. Oh, and don't bother staying near the start and waiting for the waves of reinforcements to come to you, or else you'll have trouble beating the level in 30 turns, which is required to get the Gaiden level--and remember, you need to get every Gaiden level to unlock the Perfect Run Final Boss.
    • On that note, Chapter 16, Retaking the Capital. There's a rather powerful enemy General who must be kept alive in order to unlock the Gaiden level. Most recommend putting him to sleep to get the bulk of your forces past him and leaving one unit with high HP and dodge, stripped of their weapons and packing an Elixir or two, in his range to keep him busy. Also, mages/sages and bishops with Bolting/Purge.
  • Any time there's a desert level in a Fire Emblem game, you know trouble is headed your way, because your movement on the desert is mega-slow. Paladins normally move 8 spaces, but on deserts it's 2 spaces. Magicians (Non-mounted of course--hope you trained some. And no, this doesn't include the Spoony Bard.) aren't affected by this, and neither are fliers, which the enemy army typically has a whole lot of. The Sword of Seals makes it worse by forcing you to use Sophia--a level ONE Shaman who dies in one shot from just about everything--in this desert level, which just so happens to include Fog of War. And you need to keep her alive AND pass the level in 25 turns or you won't get the Bonus Level, which is needed for getting to the proper end of the game. Now, desert levels typically hide items in the sand. You find them by putting a Thief or high-luck-stat unit on the space where the item is (just barely evades Guide Dang It by putting the items near bones on the map). Going back to The Sword of Seals, you have to protect Sophia in Fog of War, worry about the time limit AND worry about finding all the items... AND one final item that only Sophia can find! There's also a Bishop with a Sleep spell who can freeze Sophia and make her helpless to just about anything? And odds are she won't resist it either--her resistance is low, considering she's level ONE.
    • Actually, Sophia's resistance is a respectable 8 at Lv.1, UNPROMOTED, and she ends up with the second-highest Resistance in the game. So she actually resists Sleep better than most promoted units...it's everything with a weapon, especially the Dragon Riders, that prove more dangerous to her. And, unfortunately, the Sleep staff has the unpleasant side-effect of hitting your best offensive characters more often than not.
    • C15 of Path of Radiance. Not only do you have a desert that slows down everyone except mages, flying units, and thieves; the map is full of Laguz shapeshifters whose stats after transformation are impossible to predict. Between this, the Guide Dang It locations of the treasures and Stefan, and the fact that you're rewarded for not killing the Laguz who are making every effort to kill you...
  • Chapter 13 in Shadow Dragon. Shooters and their 3 to 10 range all but flood the map. They are at least immobile for the most part, so you can shake off the mobile enemies--which are few at all, and easily taken care of individually even on Hard 5--and then proceed to drain their ammo....except each of them has more than 5 shots and the sole Fort on the map is covered by most of the Shooters. Either that or relying on luck and the fact that the AI Shooters won't necessarily attack people in their range when recruitable characters like the one in this chapter will attack the very people who can recruit them regardless of reasoning.
  • Thracia 776 is renowned for being Nintendo Hard, and there are many different levels in this game that would easily qualify as That One Level in normal Fire Emblem games, but the one level that takes the cake is Chapter 22. Lots of high-leveled enemies that all have a boosted 30% accuracy and avoid thanks to a particular character on the map, status-inflicting staff users (in this game, long-range staffs can affect anyone on the map, and bad statuses do not wear off over time) and lots of ballistas that are subject to the same accuracy/avoid boost that love to snipe your weaker characters off. Although it is very easy to simply cop out and use a Warp Staff to kill the boss and seize the castle on the first turn, one of the bosses, who has an army of very powerful soldiers protecting him, gives a very nice sword to someone if you have her talk to him. So, if you want that sword, or if you ran out of Warp Staves... godspeed, soldier.
    • Chapter 17 on the east path (17A) will make you feel like you had gone with Honor Before Reason and wish you had been sneaky. The particular character in question is also in this chapter, and there's a bunch of Shooters and Meteo mages around the castle to keep you from getting in quickly enough. What's that? You'll take your time and avoid the distance bastards until you wipe out everything else? No you will not, you will get torn up by Mage Knights and Poison spell Dark Mages up the wazoo. Poison itself is a nasty status effect here, averting Useless Useful Spell; it actually deals passable damage on each turn....or rather it would be JUST that if it didn't last indefinitely and the means for getting rid of it wasn't overly limited. Worse, the bastards with the poison spell can teleport themselves with Rewarp Wands, and thanks to the hyper accuracy, they will hit and poison you even if you strike first, and no you will not One-Hit Kill them unless you have a seriously overleveled character, and the hyper avoid makes it quite possible that a second character will have to attack and risk being counterattacked and poisoned. It's so bad that MageKnight404 got upset having to deal with it and was relieved when the character finally left, and he has experienced Chapter 22.
    • And those chapters actually pale in comparison to Chapter 24x. The whole chapter consists of a never ending swarm of berserkers with ridiculous crit rates and the mentioned Dark Mages with the stupid Poison-inflicting tomes.
      • If that weren't bad enough, the map is full of invisible trap tiles that warp any unit unlucky enough to cross it to an inescapable room full of said enemies and the only way to get them out is to use a Rescue Staff to bring them to the staff's user... The problem is that particular staff only has three charges and there only 2-3 of them in the entire game, and you've likely used them up at this point and/or are saving them for the final chapter. And to make things worse, this is an escape chapter meaning your troops has to make it to the exit and leave before your Lord can, otherwise any units left behind will automatically be captured. And since 24x is AFTER the chapter you are able to break your captured units out of prison (Chpt 21x), anyone abandoned/captured here will be considered DEAD at this point.
    • Even getting access to the chapter is a pain, due to the sheer amount of luck involved. In the previous chapter, you have to rescue children being pursued by those Dark Mages and carry the right child to a door who will unlock it, revealing a room with a chest that has the item required to unlock Chapter 24x, the problem with this task is that carrying another unit(even a child) cuts the unit's stats in half making attacking enemies very risky, the child who can unlock that door is totally random, this chapter is full of chapter-lasting Standard Status Effects, and the children are far away from that room and you have to fight those Dark Mages for them. If one of them captures/kills the child you need, you are screwed.
  • ANY "Defend" mission if you actually defend, or attack in the wrong place, or send in the wrong units, or send in the wrong level units... Any defend mission.
    • Not all of them. Chapter 2-E in Radiant Dawn may be a Defend mission, but it is also a Best Level Ever.
  • Chapter 2 in Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu can give you a lot of headaches. Namely, the condition of keeping those three NPC knights alive if you want the Knight Ring (it lets foot units move again after attacking, VERY useful for dancers!). And no, you can't get it again in the second half.
    • A close second is the final part of the last chapter in which you not only have to withstand a barrage of enemies, a powerful boss with a Holy Weapon and three Falcon Knights with Awareness and the Critical Skill but you also have to hurry over to Velthomer to take out Manfloy so you can get Julia back on your side! And you NEED her back on your side, because without her the Final Boss is pretty much impossible. Most players typically let her chase Ares or Seliph while the rest of the army deals with the other enemies, as those two have long movement range and high resistance; selling Julia's things at the end of chapter 9 also means she'll come in with a mere Lightning tome, which does very little damage. Putting her to sleep could also help, provided you happen to have a staff unit with high enough magic or both magic rings.
  • The Sacred Stones is rather easy overall, even without the Level Grinding you can do in the Tower of Valni. One level, however, is pure torture: Fluorspar's Oath. The level is set up so that you have to corkscrew your units around a winding river. You could use your 2 Pegasus Knights or your Wyvern Knight to fly a few units across to save some time, but then they get put in the range of Archers and Selena's long-range Bolting tome. Fine, use Colm and (If you promoted him to pirate) Ross to rescue a few units across. Psyche! Even on water, Ross is really damn slow when carrying someone, and will get owned by the sword-wielding cavaliers, the archers, and/or Selena's lightning. Also, you have to reach two towns before the Pirates and Brigands get it. Yeah.
    • Chapter 11, Phantom Ship on Ephraim's route, if you didn't grind in the Tower of Valni, is a nightmare on Hard Mode. You have to fight your way through a ship full of enemies to get to L'Arachel before she's stupidly killed because she's a noncombatant at this point, while her bodyguard Dozla is running off attempting (and mostly failing) to hit enemies with his huge Battle Axe. You could send your fliers to rescue her, but the seas around you are swarming with flying enemies, including flying spell-casters that can nuke the otherwise hardy flier Cormag. And at this point, there is nobody in your army big enough to rescue Dozla.
    • Heck, all of Ephraim's route. In between the aforementioned "Phantom Ship" and "Fluorspar's Oath" is "Landing at Taizel", a giant level which you get thrust into immediately after "Phantom Ship" (no chance to level-grind) and has enemies all over the place. Also, in order to recruit Marisa, you have to use the newly-recruited Ewan, who has a movement range of 4 and gets owned in one hit by everything because he's a Trainee-class unit and a Squishy Mage at that. The only way to properly make this recruitment is to lure her in with another unit, preferably unarmed because anything strong enough to stand up to her criticals would probably one-shot her due to her low HP. This requires careful planning to pick off any other enemies that are even remotely close.
      • And after those three, there's "Father and Son", which does hard the old-fashioned way: by being gigantic and filled with enemy reinforcements as well as chests that must be opened. And we're not counting the two Druids with really, really effective Berserk staves, that are almost guaranteed to make units with low Resistence go Ax Crazy and attack whoever's on their reach-- even those on your own side.
    • The game throws an early That One Level very early on at the Adlas Plains when Eirika is still the default main character. Before the level starts, the level boss decides to taunt Eirika by teleporting three random, defenseless civilians into the map, and putting them right near a den of giant spiders, which turns it into a Timed Mission as letting all of the civilians die leads to a Nonstandard Game Over. Between the NPCs and the spiders is a fairly strong force of Grado soldiers(which can inflict some very painful damage on your still-squishy units). And the whole thing is covered by Fog of War. It's basically a combination of almost every single Scrappy Mechanic in the series.
      • Not helping at all is the enemy outnumbering the cast a lot more than in the previous levels and being spread out all over; if anyone but Seth goes out on their own (like your pegasus knight trying to get the civilians out of spider range...) they WILL get ganged up on and most likely die. This level is one of the best arguments the "It's OK to use Seth" camp has in its arsenal early on... but even THEN poor Seth can potentially get killed in his way to the boss, if he doesn't have a Torch handy and therefore is unable to find him in time.
  • And then there's Scorched Sand. Half of the level is made up of desert tiles, which make any non-flying mounted unit essentially useless and any armored unit even MORE so. And as for all other units, they get slowed down substantially, making the level just drag on for hours on end. Good thing this map offers obscenely good items to break up the monotony. Want to get them? Better check the strategy guide! And at the end of it all, you face That One Boss, who is way too likely to kill off even your best units. And there's actually two bosses. Which of them was meant when they were referred to as That One Boss? Why, both of them. A way to get around this is to have Rennac and a promoted Colm ready to both find the items (Thieves and their promoted ilk will have higher chances to get 'em) and steal the bossess' bonus items, but they can easily get killed off if the player's not ready...
  • Prologue 8 and Chapter 6X of FE12. Prologue 8 has Katerina as the boss, and due to the way resistance works in this game, her attacks will do tremendous amounts of damage to you, if they don't just outright kill you. She, unlike many early-game bosses, can and will move to attack people in range. Chapter 6X is a small map filled to the brim with Fighters, and on top of that there's Caesar and Radd, who you actually have to keep alive so that they'll join you later. However, they won't hesitate to attack your best units and die trying. At least Radd is fast enough to avoid being hit twice.
  • Some of the Game Mods have their own difficult chapters:
    • Chapter 6 in FE Girls, a very elaborate hack of Sacred Stones. Similar to its real-game counterpart, but there's no fog, no giant spiders, and you only have to survive for 12 turns. However, you still have to defend the helpless citizens, who are now stranded on a pier and the first one will die on the third turn if you aren't going full tilt towards them. The enemies will flood this area, too, citizens or no. On top of this, ZEPHIEL of all people is here, and, starting on the eighth turn, HE MOVES! He'll reach the island with the pier, too, so if you stopped after rescuing the citizens, thinking you're safe, you're DEAD wrong. You actually have to start retreating, citizens in tow, unless you want to see the stragglers get slaughtered where they stand. Good lord.
    • Chapter 13 somehow manages to be even worse than Chapter 13-Ephraim in regular FE8. There's three different bosses, one of them actually appears behind you and will start chasing you, and the map is very large. And you get two new characters, one of which is a Dancer and the other one, while capable of fighting, is very hard to keep alive with all the enemies around. While one of the bosses can be swayed to your side, said boss is very aggressive, carries a Bolting tome, and moves. It's not unlikely to see her kill Lyn, the very person who recruits her. She's also the Lord. And you know what that means...
  • Engage's final few chapters introduce the Shards gimmick, where every two turns the boss will use the Fell Dragon Shards to blast the player's army with fire, send them backwards with avalanches, or hit them with beams of light. The game warns you when it's about to happen, but depending on how your army's divided or situated it can be hard to get everyone out of the way in time.
    • The last two chapters of the Fell Xenologue. Chapter 5 has Alear being kept prisoner and unable to fight, Fell Fogado with Veronica's bracelet and the ability to summon all manner of tough fabrications, Corrupted Wolves that can cause a unit to slowly lose HP with their "cursed" bites, knife-wielders, and Nel "trapped" by herself (though still able to fight) with Rafal set on attacking her. If she or Alear dies, it's game over. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the final chapter throws every single Corrupted royal at you, Rafal creating MORE mooks from red spots on the ground, and eventually causing bits of land to disintegrate - if a character is standing on one, they fall instantly. Thankfully, deaths in the Fell Xenologue aren't permadeaths, but many players did NOT have a good time.
  • Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes has "Cycles of Nostalgia", Arval's paralogue. Unlocking it is easy enough (just fail to recruit Byleth and Jeralt), but the paralogue itself? For starters, you can't even use Shez like you can for all the other paralogues. Only Arval, who you can unlock using Renown. Then, Arval starts as a level 50 magic unit with horrible defenses and can't learn from the Tactics Instructor, so unless you've been leveling them up, given them a good tome and a strong shield, and have some of the best meal effects active, you're going to have the worst time. Third, there are a lot of bosses and none of them are pulling any punches. Forget getting an S rank, you'll be lucky enough to survive. Thankfully, it does provide some backstory and flavor to Arval's origins, so it's worth the pain.
  • Three Houses has some challenges, but one of the worst is Marianne's paralogue. You start off with her separated from the rest of the group on a fog of war map swarming with monsters, and she's right next to the boss. Even if you made her a sturdier Holy Knight or Dark Knight, Marianne is on the squishy side, and unless you warp someone over to her right away or have her flee, she'll be monster chow pretty quickly.