FE6 Arcadia Write-up

Chapter 14 of Fire Emblem: Binding Blade is a fairly infamous map, and what with combining both desert map and fog map along with an escort, it certainly would seem to easily earn that reputation. However, I don't exactly agree with gripes on this map for the most part, and this is a simple write-up on why.

**Fog**
A little quick elaboration: I'm not a fan of Fog of War. Out of all the Intelligent Systems games' fog maps I've played, I've actively enjoyed maybe 3 of them, and Arcadia is not one of them. Now, that being said, I'm not going to pretend like fog is some work of Satan that is basically the game telling you it hates you(ok maybe just  a little). In the course of the game, by this you are guaranteed to have 2 Thieves automatically have joined your side and possibly a third one being in your roster too. Alongside this, a Vendor back in Chapter 9(your first encounter with Fog) offers Torches and even in Chapter 13 right before you go into 14 you have another opportunity to stock up on them. Quite logically, combining a Thief's already long vision range with the Torch's vision extension gives you a pretty wide amount of information on what lies ahead.

**Treasure Items**
You can actually cheat the RNG of non-Thief units getting treasure, but I'm going to assume you don't do that and simply deploy 2 Thieves. The big attraction in this map is that you can get some goodies here that range from spectacular to ok, I guess. Of particular note are the Boots, the Silver Card, and the Warp staff. The Boots with their nice movement increase are in the expected path so you actually might even get them without actively thinking "Ok, Boots are here."

The Silver Card is an absolute boon, allowing the conversion of 4k Gold=a statbooster in C21(or a Robe in C16), rather than being 8k Gold. It also allows you to stock up on the more mundane stores more easily. Anyway, the point is that this one is actually legitimately guarded by a Wyvern squad and somewhat a Manakete. This one is certainly one where your Thieves will absolutely need assistance to get as that's a bit much too handle. I won't elaborate too much on this, just reiterate that your Thief will need some help getting this treasure but logically you should be able to with the units at your disposal

The Warp staff sits fairly far away and can be seen as your final reward of the map. It actually is a bit less guarded than it seems blanket staring at a WoD map because the Wyvern squad and most of the Mages are immediately aggressive, leaving you in the end only having to really sneak around the Manaketes and the bottom Mage .

**Cecilia**
A fairly short point this one. Owing to being on a mounted class, she moves slower on desert terrain. That being said, protecting her from the Mercenary group isn't really difficult, she doesn't hurt Mages much but she can take them, and Rose/Maggie's group spawns so late/far from your group that she can just advance to the non-desert terrain by the end before they reach her. She's also a free extra Restore user and can perhaps deal a lot of damage to Wyverns with her trusty Aircalibur, so some points for that.

**Sophia**
Right, the infamous one. She fetches a Guiding Ring near the end of the map and even if you're not too keen on a magic promotion or 1.25 statboosters, her life is necessary so you can access Chapter 14x which itself is necessary for the best ending. Sounds tragic to protect her. But actually, doing that isn't all that awful. Now yes, Sophia is an awful unit that joins with awful base stats even by the standards of all the way back in Chapter 1. I'm not going to go on too long with that part. So naturally, since she's statistically both frail and bad at combat, it would stand to reason that she would be a tough escort. And sure, if you recklessly have her on the frontlines she's bound to catch some Mercenary steel to the face. That being said, logically you should have your better units lead the charge and with vision tricks previously discussed minimize surprise against that group(Mercs can't cheat cliffs!). I'm going to leave out the Mages off of Sophia's risks since she happens to have some capacity of not instantly crumbling to dust if she's caught by one. So that leaves the right Wyvern squad, since the left one doesn't immediately charge you. And admittedly this one is perhaps clouded by bias, but you can still protect her from that one with the units you got. Most notably Klein has a nice role in this chapter of being more than just a filler combat unit, and you can have a couple others help him out to round out killing the squad quickly. As a final little aside, the Sleep Bishop(maybe it was a Priest, but I don't think it's too important) likes targetting Sophia due to her deployment slot. This is actually fairly nice, as if you can Restore her she soaks the Sleep uses and makes the advancement of your army smoother.

**Winged help**
I won't go too deeply into this, but by now 3 fliers have joined your roster, one recently having done so. Depending on how you performed dealing with Tate's squad you either have gotten 2 or 3 Elysian Whips by this point. Whatever the case, considering how much they help in general, not just in this chapter, it would be sensible to have promoted flying units by this point of the game. Since they fly, they do not worry about terrain penalties or cliffs blocking whatsoever. The developers put one Aircalibur Mage by the Mercenary group to make things harder for fliers to sweep, but they still are super solid all around, be it for rescue dropping units(especially the Thieves) to ease traversing the desert or performing combat from a variety of positions. They also themselves can carry Torches, giving you even more access to scouting the area all-around. Demonstrating the nicety of fliers on this map is admittedly not exactly something simple with just text and some video aid would be better but I kinda don't feel like gathering footage for this too much...

Still, fliers help a lot.


**Turn limit**
I don't think most people go over this too much, but I should stress out still that 25 turns to get Chapter 14x is generous. That's a bit more than enough turns for Roy to straight-up walk from start to the gate if for reasons he had to. Considering the previous point though, he probably shouldn't though. The amount of time you got is sufficient to win at a lax pace(perhaps not an armor lax pace but I've never tried) and get all the loot, chill.

**Competing difficulty with other chapters**
FE6 has a lot of maps that can be tough or outright nasty. Chapter 7 juggles you with a lot of competent enemies in a map layout fairly unfavorable for you when your army's quality is still lackluster, along with holding some tight and possibly luck-based objectives. Chapter 15(very not infamous), coming up basically next(14x is a nice time to warpskip, kinda tolerable if you don't) has some competent or outright tough enemies blocking your path and a non-generous turn limit to get the Hammerne and Garret, along with holding your refresher away from your army at the start so that you can recruit Perceval(perhaps a bit biased with how I experienced this chapter admittedly).  Chapter 19 Sacae route is an open field with Nomad enemies. Chapter 21 if you don't walk around reinforcement zones can overwhelm you rather quickly and the boss is an absolute unit.

By comparison Chapter 14 is a leisurely walk in the desert storm where sometimes you see dragons and heroes. What a crossover of modern and medieval adventure.

**The boss**
An actual legitimate gripe I have, what a shocker. Yeah I won't elaborate too hard on this one, you fight a Hero on a Gate and likely end up with shaky hitrates. His Light Brand means that if you attack at range he'll do a fixed 10 damage that cannot crit, but it can be tougher to cheese from there depending on how you've raised your army. Not far off from typical Binding Blade boss affairs...

**Conclusion**
The bottomline here is that Arcadia holds some reputation for being this big, scary evil monster that eats children and you alive, when really it's yet another chapter where playing around its difficulty is really not THAT hard and I am a bit doubtful if I'd even rate this in Top 10(or so) Hardest FE6 Chapters after having cleared this game a couple times.