There’s a commonly held belief about the Lunatic difficulty in Fire Emblem Awakening: it’s very poorly balanced. This opinion is so widespread that you can Google the term, “Fire Emblem Awakening Lunatic”, and find several extremely frustrated individuals lamenting how unfair Lunatic is. Even the people in the comments section agree, and they never agree with anything. 

Heck, Awakening’s poor balance is such a widespread opinion that I actually first heard about it in-person instead of online. I played Awakening for the first time back in 2013, while I was still attending classes in college. At the time, a few of my classmates saw I was playing Fire Emblem between classes, and would chat with me about my experience. However, all of them advised that I should avoid playing the game on Lunatic difficulty because it was unfair, and unfun.

Yeesh. Okay.

There are a variety of reasons for why people hate Lunatic so much, but I think the common thread between them is that it feels too reliant on luck. Players commonly find themselves in situations where they either need a critical hit, or a dual strike* to survive. If you fail to achieve either, then your characters die, and you’re forced to replay the level.

Well – okay you’re not forced to replay the level, but I don’t know of any Fire Emblem player that doesn’t restart whenever someone dies. The 1 exception to this is when someone is playing an ironman challenge, which forces you to play through your mistakes. Otherwise, Fire Emblem players are quick to reverse time, and keep everyone alive. Even if everyone includes units that’ll sit on the bench for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough.

The other common complaint is that only a few characters are actually viable in Lunatic. Half of the fun of Fire Emblem (for me anyway) is using new team compositions, or classes across several playthroughs. I assume that’s true for others as well, which is part of why being forced to use only the best units while playing Lunatic rubs so many folks the wrong way.

Anyway, thanks to this overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards Lunatic, I’ve always played Awakening on Hard. Though, I don’t actually find Hard all that difficult anymore because I’m so familiar with the title. I’d like to play a higher difficulty, but Lunatic is impossible, or so I thought, so I’ve continued sticking to Hard.

However, my perception of Lunatic was about to change thanks to a handful of Fire Emblem content creators.

It all started last year when I got really into watching Fire Emblem content on Youtube following my first playthrough of Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest. Fates basically took over my life for the entire month of April. Unfortunately, the game is several years old, so not many people are playing or discussing it actively anymore. As such, Youtube was a bit of an outlet for me because it hosts several videos about Fire Emblem Fates that I could watch between my play sessions.

This trek into Fire Emblem videos eventually led me to discover one of my favourite Fire Emblem content creators: ActualLizard. They put out a lot of really thoughtful videos discussing the aspects of all Fire Emblem games that they really enjoy. In fact, their enthusiasm for the series is infectious, and always makes me want to play more of the games myself.

Either way, they put out a video a few months ago which discussed the viability of Sully in Awakening. Having played Awakening, I decided to watch it because I was interested in hearing Lizard’s thoughts. However, there was something weird about the video: Lizard was playing on Lunatic in all of the background footage. In fact, their entire script was based on their experience using Sully in Lunatic.

What the fuck?! That’s not right. Awakening’s Lunatic is supposed to be impossible unless you exclusively use Robin, or Frederick. How is Lizard getting away with using Sully? What’s more, they also appear to be using a full squad, instead of a single overleveled unit. How is this possible?

Obviously, this broke my brain a little bit. Lizard’s video challenged an assumed truth I had about Awakening, and presented irrefutable evidence that you could, in fact, play Awakening on Lunatic like any other Fire Emblem game. You weren’t restricted to specific units, classes, or strategies like most folks insisted you were in any online discussion about Lunatic’s difficulty. 

It took awhile for this new information to sink in, but once it had I decided to do something that I never thought I’d do: play Awakening on Lunatic. I dusted off my 3DS, pulled my copy of Awakening off the shelf, and hopped right into my first Lunatic playthrough.

Yep. That’s right. I went in with no plan. 

I think it’s important to state that I always have a plan for Fire Emblem games while playing on anything above Normal difficulty. These games tend to reward thoughtful long term decision making, so it’s usually a good idea to have a loose plan for how you want to flesh out your army. This can be as simple as identifying which characters will be your frontline soldiers, and which will serve as backline support, or as involved as figuring out exactly which skills, and equipment every character will have for each chapter of the game. Either way, you typically need a plan so that you don’t waste your limited resources.

With that in mind, I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on how poorly my first attempt at Lunatic went. But I’m going to anyway because it’s funny.

It went bad. Real bad.

There exists no words in the English language that can accurately describe exactly how poorly my pea-brained attempt to clear Lunatic with no plan went. I died so hard that I think my life got 10 years shorter.

And you know what the real rub is? It went exactly how people described it would. My wins were almost entirely decided by lucky critical hits, and I was stuck using nothing but Robin, and Frederick to clear most maps. After 5 chapters of that shitshow, I threw in the towel. Clearly there was something I wasn’t understanding here, but I didn’t have the patience to figure out what it was.

I’d love to say that this disaster completely put me off wanting to play Lunatic, but I’m not smart enough for that. I was still fixated on how ActualLizard managed to get through those first several chapters with Sully in tow. There had to be something I was missing.

As luck would have it, another Fire Emblem content creator named Ellery would swoop in to save the day. Ellery has an entire series on Youtube where they discuss strategies for beating Awakening’s even more infamous Lunatic+ difficulty. However, they cover a lot of tips that are applicable for first-time Lunatic players too.

In fact, Ellery received so many questions from first-timers that they made a video specifically for them titled How to Build a TEAM for Lunatic+ in Fire Emblem Awakening. The main goal of the video was to dispel the myth that you can’t run a full team of units in either difficulty, while also explaining the thought process that Ellery uses while team building for Fire Emblem Awakening. This invites the viewer into the discussion, so they can start formulating their own plan of attack for handling Lunatic (or Lunatic+) instead of relying on Ellery to simply tell them which units to use for the duration of their playthrough.

As an aside, I feel like that’s the biggest problem with guides on Awakening’s Lunatic mode: they only tell you what to do, not why you do it. This means that a lot of players don’t understand the rationale behind many of the suggestions in guides, and erroneously assume these suggestions are the only way to play the game. 

This is something that even I’m guilty of, for what it’s worth, so don’t take that as a personal attack.

Anyway, watching Ellery’s video immediately got my gears turning. I had an idea of which units I’d like to use for which roles, and why I’d want to use them. I’m not going to say my plan was terribly original, but it didn’t need to be. Experimentation, and iteration are reserved for repeat playthroughs. Your first Lunatic playthrough is just about survival, so slotting your old favourites into roles that you know they can excel at is a worthwhile play.

And you know what? Going into Lunatic with a loose outline of a plan actually worked. I was expecting that I’d have to iterate on it before I could actually finish the campaign, but I didn’t need to. I just won. Like…I’m writing this after I rolled credits on Lunatic. I fucking did it! No solo Robin or Frederick to carry the entire team. I had 3 carries (Robin, Vaike, and Cordelia), a couple offensive support units, and several utility support units.  My endgame squad looked just as stacked as any other playthrough of Awakening.

Heck, I didn’t need to grind (much) to win either. There’s this mechanic in Awakening where zombie hordes (called Risen) will spawn periodically on the worldmap. This gives struggling players an opportunity to replay maps to earn additional experience points, and money. I only completed 6 of these across my Lunatic campaign because they were blocking maps with shops that I needed to access, and I didn’t want to wait real-world time for them to despawn.

I’m not going to say those Risen maps didn’t help because they did. I probably would’ve needed to restart my run, and optimize out a few of the bumps in the road before I could’ve secured a victory without any grinding. I still think that was a really good effort for my “first” Lunatic run though. This went from being a completely insurmountable challenge to something I actively had fun completing over the course of the past week.

Having said all of that, it wasn’t just Ellery’s advice on team building that helped to secure that win. They also had another piece of advice that I think is very important for surviving Lunatic: front load your risk.

Ellery explained this during the attached video, but the basic idea is that you should make all of your risky plays in the first 2 turns of a chapter. After that, you should stick to safe plays with low variance whenever possible.

It’s really hard to build any inertia in Awakening when you aren’t willing to take risks. What I mean is that you’re always 1 step away from being on the backfoot if you only play safe. This means that you’ll inevitably be backed into a corner (figuratively, or literally), and then you’ll be forced into making risky plays. This is why so many people, myself included, felt like Lunatic was very luck-based. We’d play too safe, and then be forced into risky situations when we finally ran out of runway for low variance actions. This meant that our runs were contingent on scoring these huge make-or-break rolls, which felt awful regardless of the outcome.

By frontloading your risky plays, you eliminate a lot of this nonsense by giving yourself a far larger runway to work with. Ellery uses a speed running example in their video, but the same line of thinking works for fighting games in a tournament setting too. If you’re going to do something really risky, it’s typically better to do it when you can actually afford to lose ground to your opponent, instead of gambling everything when you’re 1 hit away from losing the entire set.

This also has the practical advantage of speeding up any losses you experience, which makes playing Lunatic a lot less frustrating. Your mileage may vary here, but losing after only 5 to 10 minutes of play, and having a new idea for how to get through a level is a lot less frustrating to me than losing when I’m 45 minutes deep in a level. As such, it makes more sense to take those risks when I’ve got a lot less to lose.

The really crazy thing that I noticed while actively trying to play more risky, and aggressively in my opening turns was that I didn’t need to restart levels that often. In the majority of cases, I’d play a chapter twice: the first run was for scouting, and the second was the real thing. The idea here was that I’d try to test out some ideas I had, and then I’d revise them on the second attempt based on what worked, and what didn’t. Once I found a strong opener, it was usually fairly easy to complete the rest of the map without any major setbacks.

I think the single best example of this philosophy in action was Chapter 16. I normally hate this chapter for a few reasons. It’s the first level where the enemy has more promoted units than unpromoted units. This means that the power spike that I’ve enjoyed from using my promoted units will disappear during this chapter. There’s also a ton of reinforcements that flood the map from behind the player. This makes them especially difficult to deal with as you’re not given any room to maneuver your squishy backline units since you’re surrounded by foes on all sides. All of this makes Chapter 16 especially frustrating to get through.

While playing in Lunatic, I knew I couldn’t deal with any of the reinforcements because my army was not strong enough to tank through them like I could on Hard. This meant that I was forced to take a far more aggressive path when dealing with the chapter. As such, I moved my carries up, and cleared out huge swaths of the map during the first 3 turns. This meant that I was able to rundown the boss, and eliminate him before the reinforcements caught up to my army.

Hilariously, this was the easiest clear I’ve ever had of Chapter 16 across any of my playthroughs of Awakening. What’s even funnier is that it was on Lunatic of all things. The big difference here was that I scored so much early momentum by playing more aggressively, and I could ride that through to an easy turn 5 win. I didn’t end up even making any risky plays beyond turn 2 since most of the map’s problematic foes were gone by the start of turn 3.

I guess that’s really the point I wanted to make by sharing this whole experience with you today. Lunatic was something I enjoyed – I enjoyed it a lot actually. There were so many chapters that I’ve struggled to beat in previous playthroughs that I completely breezed through in my Lunatic run. All it took was an outsider’s perspective to push me in a different direction, and I ended up having a lot of fun once that happened.

*Dual Strike is a mechanic wherein a nearby or paired up unit can join in during another unit’s attack to boost the strength of the attack. It’s basically like having 2 units attack the same target simultaneously, and, similar to critical hits, boosts the damage output of a character considerably. It’s also chance based ranging from a 30% to 90% activation chance based on various factors.

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