It's time for the finale of my all gay, all maddening run of FE3H! Come drop in and find out if the members of the infamous Garreg Mach LGBT Alliance and Archery Club can finally achieve victory!
After about three and a half hours of careful navigation through the final two maps, the Garreg Mach LGBT Alliance and Archery Club has successfully conquered Fódlan for the gays!
This is my first time beating any FE game on maddening difficulty (w.o abusing NG+), and it feels great to know that I could build up an army from square one and achieve victory. From the beginning, I had a plan for who would do what and what skills and classes they would need to fulfill their roles, and it's super gratifying to see it all come together successfully.
To my surprise, while the first three chapters or so were incredibly difficult to navigate with such underlevelled units, the majority of the pre-timeskip chapters past that point were actually pretty easy. Once the characters start mastering their first classes, it's very easy to outpace even maddening difficulty's absurdly high levels. That changed once we hit the timeskip, as the game suddenly became unrelentingly difficult. Even when doing all I could to maximize the training and levels our core units received, it was still hard to keep pace with the level demands.
That said, I managed to do it, and I feel really good about that! I know that those in the FE community still think of games like this as too easy, even when played on the highest difficulty, but for me, this has been a huge vote of confidence in my ability to strategize and do well at these kinds of games.
Anyway, thank you to everyone who came out to watch me struggle through this, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.