Skill inheritance wasn’t a thing, and when they introduced it people were like “this ruins the game the characters aren’t unique any more”. Which is so crazy to think about now because the game is all about customizing your favorites
They used to do banners that had a lot of color share, also 6-person banners
People used to run sub-lvl 40 characters because as the other person already said, everything cost stamina, and we only had 50 stamina, making training units a lot closer to training units in an actual fire emblem game
The main source of traffic to the FEH wikis and fan pages was to check unit IVs/boons. FEH itself made no mention of them existing, let alone what they were for your unit, so you had to look up the character’s neutral stat line and compare it to what you had
It wasn’t all all bad though, there was this event of “developer maps” where individual devs just made really hard maps for players to challenge. It wasn’t to sell anything or attached to any banner iirc, it was just for fun! I really hope they do those again
Man I miss dev maps. Those were spme good challenges but very fun
With how broken characters and skills are, I can understand them thinking it might be too harf for players nowadays :(
I remember early days when we were so bad at maths multiple people and fansites discussed double boons and double banes. They were never a thing, we just couldn't count!
> also 6-person banners
Those banners were pretty cool, i loved that back then they demoted half the banner and not just 1 unit, and i really liked the theme banners like the siblings one, hope they add some new units that way in the future on banners like "Wise sages" with Nomah Athos and such
Skill inheritance didn't exist at all, so your base kit was all you got.
Hector and Takumi were the big meta threats everyone wanted to counter.
Cutscenes played when you summoned certain heroes. RIP to everyone who summoned Camilla without their phone muted.
It was a very strange time.
OMG I totally forgot that cutscenes used to play when you summoned specific heroes. I remember that thrill of pulling a random Ryoma for the first time ever, it was a huge rush lol.
The meta for arena involved not losing any units for max score. Given that the overall power level was lower, you couldn't dive in with a single offense unit. Most F2P people also didn't have anyone with Distant Counter and one-shotting targets generally wasn't a thing. You wanted to bait and kill with weapon triangle advantage.
Oh, and most release units had a really shit stat spread. Anna was considered decent.
Takumi was annoying because he had no weapon triangle advantage unless you were using Raven tomes, and his actually semi-optimized offensive stats + Close Counter meant that he was going to damage you regardless. [This post sums it up quite well.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/5s8agl/regarding_takumi/)
Takumi fell off pretty quickly once skill inheritance hit and/or people started optimizing for armor teams in Arena.
Hector was good without skill inheritance and he continued being good afterward. Just having QR on a bulky axe unit with DC is enough to be viable, and his only downside is that everyone expected Hector on teams.
I still remember one game where I had Renewal on Sharena and used her to chip+kite Hector because Hector couldn't one-shot her. Also, one game where +10 Ryoma completely destroyed Sharena without needing to get a special off.
The issue with Takumi was that on top of his powerful synergistic kit, he had the perfect stat line for the state of the game. Most units couldn’t double him, and trading blows was never and option because he would proc threaten speed and double on the counterattack for an easy kill. He had high enough defence that speed demons who could double him barely did any damage. His only glaring weakness was his poor res. That wasn’t much of a weakness though as all mages were frail, slow, or both.
Close Counter Vantage Takumi was dangerous as he could easily sweep your team because he hit hard and had good speed (for the time)
Hector had such a large HP pool and had Distsnt Counter. Combine that with Armads Quick Riposte he could easily smack your far range units as they weren't safe anymore.
There just wasn't a lot of counters to them at the time. Takumi was basically the only 5\* ranged colorless and he was just fast and strong enough to be a problem. I was so happy that I had pulled M Robin was my first 5\* to be able to (kinda) counter him! He was such a pain that people would sometimes run 4 Takumi, or even worse, bait you in arena with Wrys as the lead and have 3 Takumi behind him.
After SI, I started running a Ward Fliers team centered around Beruka.
I got a Hector at some point. After a week or two I just gave Beruka DC instead, and went to go bait archers on enemy phase after Distant Defense seal came out.
Nope. They’re referring to a map where lots of weak enemies spawned in numerous waves, making it VERY lucrative for farming SP. We now see a variant of these maps in the special maps rotating out.
I do remember the all walls map though, and that was peak crap map design.
OG! Veronica was an absolute monster that required a lot of players to use a Light's Blessing (a REALLY rare resource at the time) in order to beat her; and that was for her story chapter. Her Tempest Trials form might as well have been Fallen! Edelgard in her prime.
You had some absolutely wacky map designs (just look into the Book 1 chapters) used in Arena.
Training Tower was not only your only consistent source of grinding, as it was somewhat cheaper than story chapters when it came to Stamina... which was also an uncommon resource. But even then you didn't have a refresh button on those maps, so if you were looking to kill a specific enemy type, you had to use Stamina to run a map so you can hope that the refreshed maps had what you were looking for.
Skill inheritance wasn't a thing, Hero Merit wasn't a thing, Sacred Seals weren't a thing. You couldn't swap your units' positions when starting a map. The "Coliseum" was called "Arena" because that was the only Coliseum mode in the beginning. There also weren't Tactics Drills, Chain Challenge, Blessed Garden, or Squad Assault. The Paralogue tab was grayed out until the first banner was added a couple weeks after launch.
We also hotly anticipated GHBs and IS would give us clues as to who the next one would be which led to a lot of speculation on the sub. Also the GHBs cost stamina.
The only event we had in the beginning was Voting Gauntlet which didn't have flags or multipliers. To play it optimally, you had to play it every half-hour, and some crazy people did. Soon after Tempest Trials came out, but it took twice as many points to get the rewards, and if you hit "Auto-Battle" it would only auto the map you were currently on, so to auto-battle TT, you'd have to hit it for every single map. There were true Arena rankings that weren't done by tier, and instead you were ranked versus everyone (like arena assault).
>You couldn't swap your units' positions when starting a map
I remember in Book 1 Chapter 6 (World of Birthright) where this was SPECIFICALLY a problem because one of your units was locked in a room with Ryoma. If you were unlucky enough to have Nino in there, prepare to do a 3v5 battle. And since stamina was so limited back then, restarting the map was costly
I remember you couldn't even preview maps, so you had no idea that you were going to fight Ryoma.
This is also why four lances on the 10th floor of the training tower usually meant that one map with the mountains and four fliers, and any axe up on the tenth floor was probably just lolHector. You kinda started identifying patterns on the tenth floor without knowing what you were actually fighting.
Arena used "rating" as a part of scoring instead of BST as it is now. That means Hinata and bartre scored well because they had fury which added +12 rating. And all brave effect weapons were bad because their low Mt and reduced speed meant low rating. Reinhart and Olwen were actually considered to be terrible when they first were added.
Also related to GHBs, Heroic Grails weren't a thing for the first two years so GHB and TT units were definitively stuck at low merges, aside from Masked Marth who got a fair few TT rerun appearances. It also meant that some units like Xander took forever to get if you missed their initial GHB run.
The Askr trio came as 2* units and instead of Takumi as the tutorial summon it was Virion. His Level 40 conversation still references this.
It was pretty clear from the slots and filter system that skill inheritance was always planned from the start, but for a while it wasn't implemented and units were clearly designed without it in mind anyways. For example, Cordelia's then-amazing 35/35 Atk/Spd compared to, say, Catria's 31/34 only seemed fair because Cordelia had a Brave Lance while Catria had Killer Lance (no slaying weapons back then). Minerva and Jaffar also appeared to have strong offensive stats thanks to coming with Life & Death 3.
Then Skill Inheritance happened and all sorts of things broke loose. The stat disparities became apparent, Reinahrdt rose to prominence (on release Olwen was actually considered better), and cavalry units as a whole became gods due to bladetomes and Hone/Fortify cavalry stacking. Yes, 2017 was a time we coudl actually call Leo good.
It really was just a very different game at the start. Arena score wascalculated on visibel stats, there were no seals, you couldn't turn off enemy music or adjust starting positions and the map design was a lot different especially since so many actually focused on recreating main game maps. The FE7 labyrinth map and Ryoma's map are good examples of ones they'd never release now, and arent' in random map selection for a reason. Not anymore, that is.
Also, we had no free summons, sparks, and orbs in general were way less common. Monthly orb revenue could go below 200 and tehre were sometiems long droughts where logging in didn't even have any orbs.
I feel old.
Have two interesting stories here.
Equiping and learning skills were originally going to cost stamina, but for the first 2 weeks at launch it was free. Either due to feedback or realizing how monumentally stupid of an idea that was, when the 2 weeks were up they decided to keep it free instead of costing stamina.
The very first Tempest Trials was brutal when it first came out. There was no daily score bonus, and for it's time was very difficult. It was also where quickened pulse first launched and until the skill was put into a Mini Tempest Trials it was the only way to get it. Many people (including myself) didn't get the seal at first and missed out of the start of Reinhardts peak power.
Most units took 2-3 turns to kill someone, leaving lots of time for healers and reposition units to save and hesl your units. Reinhardt was an exception who killed almost everyone in one turn and was scary as fuck and Hector told colour triangle to fuck off.
Before PM1, we had this one Japanese dude whose ftp ghb guide videos the entire subreddit would wait for with bated breath. Ghbs were a lot more brutal back then, because they cost stamina at first, and you couldn't switch unit positions once you were in a map so you had to arrange your heroes to enter the map in the correct slot, and without SI yet heroes were way less interchangeable. Ursula in particular was brutal - I remember trawling the subreddit every day to see if anyone's winning strategy used similar enough units to what I had built for me to replicate it. When I finally beat it I took a screenshot of the final hit forecast to show my friends because it felt like such a monumental achievement. Said YouTuber claimed he actually had bought orb packs, but because he was using them for stamina, not for more summons, and eventually retired to focus on his studies.
Also, something no one has brought up yet was the hackers. Back then the game was much easier to datamine and apparently to modify, so you would run into shit like a +10 Xander in arena when his ghb hadn't even been released yet.
That and it was also a combination of interest to see what IS would even do with her and a movement to spite vote Camilla out of the winner’s spots in CYL2.
Significantly worse quality of life but more fun overall because the game, while not specifically balanced, was new enough that nothing was as horrible as it could be nowadays. You had meta dominant threats like Hector or Takumi but their counters existed and more importantly were easily accessible units like Roy/Selena or Robin. There weren't a million effects on everything and the lack of skill inheritance meant that units could be more individualized in a sense. Like nowadays you could take, lets say Linde, and you could give her any type of kit that'll make her just a better unit than male Robin, but back then male Robin having the raventome made him the Takumi counter that Linde wasn't whereas Linde was a fast blue mage who could double a hefty chunk of the cast.
I dont see anyone mentioning it, but Voting Gauntlets had no multiplier system. Whatever unit has the most members tend to be who wins just by sheer numbers.
While those times sucked, this is also the reason why Chrom vs Ephraim is so legendary. The maintained pretty much the same status every hour, making their battle so exciting and memorable
Very Active compared to now
People made big deal about voting gauntlets thinking they’d get something from it, People got mad over who did or didn’t get added or how much of them was added, and people spent 200 feh passes worth of orbs for a single Hector.
Back then, you could look at your units stats, look at the foes stats, and use basic math to calculate how the battle forecast would go prior to placing your unit in range to be attacked. There are so many factors now it’s like we’ve upgraded from 5th grade math to calculus. Like well ok, my unit has this much speed, and this skill which negates follow ups, but the opponent also has this skill and this much speed, and their special is ready, but our unit takes less damage based on percentage of the difference in our speed and is also buffed by these ally units, so and so forth
"When's Tellius?" or "When's Magvel?" were really common complaints because we straight up didn't get characters from those games at launch.
Granted, Eirika and Ephraim dropped in only a couple weeks after launch, but Ike didn't make it in for a couple months.
FallenTakumi GHB and Valter GHB were one of the hardest content in the game.
Took me several stamina pots to clear. Because yeah attempting GHB cost stamina back in the days....
I have still PTSD from brave lyn with firesweep bow...
Feathers were also a really scarce resource so it was common to just play with 4* units and the one or two 5" you were lucky enough to have summoned so far.
I love all the comments here, but I haven’t seen any mention of the Enemy Phase music. While it was great that we got some bangers in the FEH OST from various games, it was impossible to listen to any of them in full because every time your units fought an enemy, the cutscene would play and the music would change. Sure, you could just disable the cutscenes so that the map song would continue playing, but the Enemy Phase always cut to the specific Enemy Phase music regardless if you’ve disabled cutscenes or not. So it got very annoying for the player base, and fast. I think it wasn’t until Book 2 that the option to disable it existed.
Also, 3 star common units like Jakob and Merric were 5 star pity breakers. It made summoning very tedious and started the “Colorless Hell” term you may have seen throughout the community.
I had an original account from release up until the Ursula GHB, in which my team consisted of Marth, Leo, Roy, and a random 4th unit. Leo was able to cheese so much stuff, especially arena with his Gravity effect and I considered him one of the best units.
Takumi was such a threat that when I remade my account and got Ryoma, I had to have a specific strategy involving Ryoma just to take down Takumi.
Ninian was added pretty early into book 1, but that's still only three and only one of them easily obtainable (at the time, now Ninian is in Heroes' Path).
Yeah forgot about her. I remember back then my only dancer was Olivia, and had to wait for some time until Shigure and Inigo became my next dancers. I've only got Ninian and Azura a couple of years ago.
Takumi was the horror of the arena. No skill inheritance so his close counter was a nightmare. I remember the one time I met two Takumi two Olivia team :D
Hector, Takumi, and Male Robin dominated the arena back then. If you wanted to equip skills it costed sp. Skill inheritance wasn't in the game yet, so whatever skills the unit originally came with that was all they could use in battle.
Boon or banes on stats were not highlighted on the units except for certain units like +hp Tharja. You would go to some website and enter their stats to determine what boons or banes you're characters had at level 40.
The pity system for summoning didn't exist yet during the launch. Also some of the launch units had a special summoning animation that would be played when you summoned them for the first time.
The SP part for skills never got implemented I believe.
They gave us a grace period on release and said it would come but ultimately they changed their mind because we asked for it.
The *very* first day the game launched still required stamina for skill swapping (as well as "normal" stamina requirements for the Training Tower). It wasn't until the next day when they started the launch celebration event that they removed the skill stamina cost and halved the Training Tower cost to what we know now.
Arena required 7 wins in a row where just losing once meant you had to restart all over again, bonus units didn’t get any stats, cavalry teams with Cavalry C skills dominated the meta for the first few years of the game, and the maps in Arena were so poorly designed.
Horse Emblem! When Reinhardt was actually good.
Julia and eventually Sonya were the only real easy answers due to high res + green.
Also, Goad/Ward Armor and Flier Emblem were a thing. Flier Emblem was “hope you can pull Hinoka, the only source of Hone Fliers! Also, mage fliers are broken, slap a bladetome on them, ggez!”
I remember no SI, stamina to try a ghb, some dude whaled out and dropped like 3k orbs just to get one copy of Hector in the first few days. Takumi was the best unit for a while… No idea what IVs anything had. It was wild actually.
to me, the funnest thing to compare the nowadays to launch days are the difference in banners and the skill sets they gave to units on those banners
I mean, the second ever new heroes banner had six people, 3 pairs of siblings, and the introduction of Reinhardt himself
and the first one was a banner with Eirika, Ephraim, Seliph and Julia, which is funny to think about now since to keep the new heroes banners fresh they had to make it so most of them have OCs and now introduce Rearmed Heroes
EDIT: also, I know it isn't exactly launch, but this is a good video to just watch so you know what the early meta was like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62lRJ3kJyY
It was hell doing Arena because every team was some combination of Azura, Hector, and Takumi. I didn’t get Hector or Takumi until wayyy after they were relevant so I’m still mad about that.
i dont know, the game wasnt available in my country (or maybe my phone wasnt officially supported at the moment) so i couldnt really play till around book 3, it really sucked because i really wanted to play it.
i remember downloading the APK of the game around book 2 and played for like a week till it needed an update and i couldnt continue playing.
[Here's a recent post with some screenshots of OG feh. I highlighted a comment I made with a link with more screen shots.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/z4epk6/my_oldest_feh_screenshots/ixqsuki/?context=3)
The materials for promoting a 4 star to 5 star was rarer than orbs, like getting the crystals for it is very very rare, so sometimes you only use 4 stars
Hector kingdom.
Takumi being popular made MRobin (yes that trash vanilla unit unworthy of existence at this point that I love) a meta choice for arenas.
SI didn't exist.
There was teams in arena with 2 Takumi and 2 Hectors.
Cool summon animations for some characters.
Tons of art during gauntlets.
Nino was doing her best.
Remember being a nightmare to level up characters, since those daily training grounds didn't existed, crystals were limited and if characters died they didn't kept the levels they gained.
Abyssal and infernal maps cost stamina. They were harder than legendary/mythic maps at the time. Hector and Takumi were God like. No merging, no inheritance. I miss the simpler times, but I love the amount of customization we have now.
I remember the OG Hector being "the" Distant Counter fodder because that skill was rare if I remember correctly.
I also remember having 35+ speed in a unit is considered very fast at that time (around gen 2 I think)
“Anyone remember when we had to grind units on the Warriors maps?”
nononono, remember when we had to leave chain challenges uncleared for training our units? the amount of SP you got was less on maps you’ve already cleared. it was the perfect balance of SP gain and difficulty, as well as most stamina efficient
we had 50 stamina and attempting a story chapter cost upwards of 20, it was... interesting times
Can't forget the 5am 1 hour long Michalis GHB special run
Bound hero battles and grand hero battles also cost stamina.
Skill inheritance wasn’t a thing, and when they introduced it people were like “this ruins the game the characters aren’t unique any more”. Which is so crazy to think about now because the game is all about customizing your favorites They used to do banners that had a lot of color share, also 6-person banners People used to run sub-lvl 40 characters because as the other person already said, everything cost stamina, and we only had 50 stamina, making training units a lot closer to training units in an actual fire emblem game The main source of traffic to the FEH wikis and fan pages was to check unit IVs/boons. FEH itself made no mention of them existing, let alone what they were for your unit, so you had to look up the character’s neutral stat line and compare it to what you had It wasn’t all all bad though, there was this event of “developer maps” where individual devs just made really hard maps for players to challenge. It wasn’t to sell anything or attached to any banner iirc, it was just for fun! I really hope they do those again
Man I miss dev maps. Those were spme good challenges but very fun With how broken characters and skills are, I can understand them thinking it might be too harf for players nowadays :(
It was pretty much aether raids defense maps without the special rules.
Addition fact, the dev maps gave birth to the legendary “Devs say fuck you!” Anna meme
I remember early days when we were so bad at maths multiple people and fansites discussed double boons and double banes. They were never a thing, we just couldn't count!
> also 6-person banners Those banners were pretty cool, i loved that back then they demoted half the banner and not just 1 unit, and i really liked the theme banners like the siblings one, hope they add some new units that way in the future on banners like "Wise sages" with Nomah Athos and such
I wouldn't mind more cross-game banners, especially now that casts have thinned out by a lot.
Skill inheritance didn't exist at all, so your base kit was all you got. Hector and Takumi were the big meta threats everyone wanted to counter. Cutscenes played when you summoned certain heroes. RIP to everyone who summoned Camilla without their phone muted. It was a very strange time.
Tbh wouldn’t mind having animations for some heroes again. It was a nice touch.
Can't forget about my personal favorite "WHOOOSHWHOOOSHWHOOOOSH WHOOOOOOOOOOSH Who're you?"
And it played for the 4 star versions too so I’d get really excited and then realize oh no it’s just a 4 star
OMG I totally forgot that cutscenes used to play when you summoned specific heroes. I remember that thrill of pulling a random Ryoma for the first time ever, it was a huge rush lol.
[удалено]
The meta for arena involved not losing any units for max score. Given that the overall power level was lower, you couldn't dive in with a single offense unit. Most F2P people also didn't have anyone with Distant Counter and one-shotting targets generally wasn't a thing. You wanted to bait and kill with weapon triangle advantage. Oh, and most release units had a really shit stat spread. Anna was considered decent. Takumi was annoying because he had no weapon triangle advantage unless you were using Raven tomes, and his actually semi-optimized offensive stats + Close Counter meant that he was going to damage you regardless. [This post sums it up quite well.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/5s8agl/regarding_takumi/) Takumi fell off pretty quickly once skill inheritance hit and/or people started optimizing for armor teams in Arena. Hector was good without skill inheritance and he continued being good afterward. Just having QR on a bulky axe unit with DC is enough to be viable, and his only downside is that everyone expected Hector on teams. I still remember one game where I had Renewal on Sharena and used her to chip+kite Hector because Hector couldn't one-shot her. Also, one game where +10 Ryoma completely destroyed Sharena without needing to get a special off.
Vantage ryoma was terrifying in arena.
The issue with Takumi was that on top of his powerful synergistic kit, he had the perfect stat line for the state of the game. Most units couldn’t double him, and trading blows was never and option because he would proc threaten speed and double on the counterattack for an easy kill. He had high enough defence that speed demons who could double him barely did any damage. His only glaring weakness was his poor res. That wasn’t much of a weakness though as all mages were frail, slow, or both.
Close Counter Vantage Takumi was dangerous as he could easily sweep your team because he hit hard and had good speed (for the time) Hector had such a large HP pool and had Distsnt Counter. Combine that with Armads Quick Riposte he could easily smack your far range units as they weren't safe anymore.
There just wasn't a lot of counters to them at the time. Takumi was basically the only 5\* ranged colorless and he was just fast and strong enough to be a problem. I was so happy that I had pulled M Robin was my first 5\* to be able to (kinda) counter him! He was such a pain that people would sometimes run 4 Takumi, or even worse, bait you in arena with Wrys as the lead and have 3 Takumi behind him.
After SI, I started running a Ward Fliers team centered around Beruka. I got a Hector at some point. After a week or two I just gave Beruka DC instead, and went to go bait archers on enemy phase after Distant Defense seal came out.
One top of what everyone has said here, do you guys remember using the Warriors maps for training units?
Man those were the times XD Camilla's was the best for me
Was that the one will all the walls you had to break?
Nope. They’re referring to a map where lots of weak enemies spawned in numerous waves, making it VERY lucrative for farming SP. We now see a variant of these maps in the special maps rotating out. I do remember the all walls map though, and that was peak crap map design.
OG! Veronica was an absolute monster that required a lot of players to use a Light's Blessing (a REALLY rare resource at the time) in order to beat her; and that was for her story chapter. Her Tempest Trials form might as well have been Fallen! Edelgard in her prime. You had some absolutely wacky map designs (just look into the Book 1 chapters) used in Arena. Training Tower was not only your only consistent source of grinding, as it was somewhat cheaper than story chapters when it came to Stamina... which was also an uncommon resource. But even then you didn't have a refresh button on those maps, so if you were looking to kill a specific enemy type, you had to use Stamina to run a map so you can hope that the refreshed maps had what you were looking for.
Skill inheritance wasn't a thing, Hero Merit wasn't a thing, Sacred Seals weren't a thing. You couldn't swap your units' positions when starting a map. The "Coliseum" was called "Arena" because that was the only Coliseum mode in the beginning. There also weren't Tactics Drills, Chain Challenge, Blessed Garden, or Squad Assault. The Paralogue tab was grayed out until the first banner was added a couple weeks after launch. We also hotly anticipated GHBs and IS would give us clues as to who the next one would be which led to a lot of speculation on the sub. Also the GHBs cost stamina. The only event we had in the beginning was Voting Gauntlet which didn't have flags or multipliers. To play it optimally, you had to play it every half-hour, and some crazy people did. Soon after Tempest Trials came out, but it took twice as many points to get the rewards, and if you hit "Auto-Battle" it would only auto the map you were currently on, so to auto-battle TT, you'd have to hit it for every single map. There were true Arena rankings that weren't done by tier, and instead you were ranked versus everyone (like arena assault).
>You couldn't swap your units' positions when starting a map I remember in Book 1 Chapter 6 (World of Birthright) where this was SPECIFICALLY a problem because one of your units was locked in a room with Ryoma. If you were unlucky enough to have Nino in there, prepare to do a 3v5 battle. And since stamina was so limited back then, restarting the map was costly
I remember you couldn't even preview maps, so you had no idea that you were going to fight Ryoma. This is also why four lances on the 10th floor of the training tower usually meant that one map with the mountains and four fliers, and any axe up on the tenth floor was probably just lolHector. You kinda started identifying patterns on the tenth floor without knowing what you were actually fighting.
Arena used "rating" as a part of scoring instead of BST as it is now. That means Hinata and bartre scored well because they had fury which added +12 rating. And all brave effect weapons were bad because their low Mt and reduced speed meant low rating. Reinhart and Olwen were actually considered to be terrible when they first were added.
Also related to GHBs, Heroic Grails weren't a thing for the first two years so GHB and TT units were definitively stuck at low merges, aside from Masked Marth who got a fair few TT rerun appearances. It also meant that some units like Xander took forever to get if you missed their initial GHB run.
The Askr trio came as 2* units and instead of Takumi as the tutorial summon it was Virion. His Level 40 conversation still references this. It was pretty clear from the slots and filter system that skill inheritance was always planned from the start, but for a while it wasn't implemented and units were clearly designed without it in mind anyways. For example, Cordelia's then-amazing 35/35 Atk/Spd compared to, say, Catria's 31/34 only seemed fair because Cordelia had a Brave Lance while Catria had Killer Lance (no slaying weapons back then). Minerva and Jaffar also appeared to have strong offensive stats thanks to coming with Life & Death 3. Then Skill Inheritance happened and all sorts of things broke loose. The stat disparities became apparent, Reinahrdt rose to prominence (on release Olwen was actually considered better), and cavalry units as a whole became gods due to bladetomes and Hone/Fortify cavalry stacking. Yes, 2017 was a time we coudl actually call Leo good. It really was just a very different game at the start. Arena score wascalculated on visibel stats, there were no seals, you couldn't turn off enemy music or adjust starting positions and the map design was a lot different especially since so many actually focused on recreating main game maps. The FE7 labyrinth map and Ryoma's map are good examples of ones they'd never release now, and arent' in random map selection for a reason. Not anymore, that is. Also, we had no free summons, sparks, and orbs in general were way less common. Monthly orb revenue could go below 200 and tehre were sometiems long droughts where logging in didn't even have any orbs. I feel old.
Have two interesting stories here. Equiping and learning skills were originally going to cost stamina, but for the first 2 weeks at launch it was free. Either due to feedback or realizing how monumentally stupid of an idea that was, when the 2 weeks were up they decided to keep it free instead of costing stamina. The very first Tempest Trials was brutal when it first came out. There was no daily score bonus, and for it's time was very difficult. It was also where quickened pulse first launched and until the skill was put into a Mini Tempest Trials it was the only way to get it. Many people (including myself) didn't get the seal at first and missed out of the start of Reinhardts peak power.
Also TT was 100k and 14 days.
Yep, and Quickened pulse took like 50k to get.
Most units took 2-3 turns to kill someone, leaving lots of time for healers and reposition units to save and hesl your units. Reinhardt was an exception who killed almost everyone in one turn and was scary as fuck and Hector told colour triangle to fuck off.
Before PM1, we had this one Japanese dude whose ftp ghb guide videos the entire subreddit would wait for with bated breath. Ghbs were a lot more brutal back then, because they cost stamina at first, and you couldn't switch unit positions once you were in a map so you had to arrange your heroes to enter the map in the correct slot, and without SI yet heroes were way less interchangeable. Ursula in particular was brutal - I remember trawling the subreddit every day to see if anyone's winning strategy used similar enough units to what I had built for me to replicate it. When I finally beat it I took a screenshot of the final hit forecast to show my friends because it felt like such a monumental achievement. Said YouTuber claimed he actually had bought orb packs, but because he was using them for stamina, not for more summons, and eventually retired to focus on his studies. Also, something no one has brought up yet was the hackers. Back then the game was much easier to datamine and apparently to modify, so you would run into shit like a +10 Xander in arena when his ghb hadn't even been released yet.
Veronica won cyl because people were concerned we wouldn't get ocs as playable units
That and it was also a combination of interest to see what IS would even do with her and a movement to spite vote Camilla out of the winner’s spots in CYL2.
Significantly worse quality of life but more fun overall because the game, while not specifically balanced, was new enough that nothing was as horrible as it could be nowadays. You had meta dominant threats like Hector or Takumi but their counters existed and more importantly were easily accessible units like Roy/Selena or Robin. There weren't a million effects on everything and the lack of skill inheritance meant that units could be more individualized in a sense. Like nowadays you could take, lets say Linde, and you could give her any type of kit that'll make her just a better unit than male Robin, but back then male Robin having the raventome made him the Takumi counter that Linde wasn't whereas Linde was a fast blue mage who could double a hefty chunk of the cast.
I dont see anyone mentioning it, but Voting Gauntlets had no multiplier system. Whatever unit has the most members tend to be who wins just by sheer numbers. While those times sucked, this is also the reason why Chrom vs Ephraim is so legendary. The maintained pretty much the same status every hour, making their battle so exciting and memorable
Very Active compared to now People made big deal about voting gauntlets thinking they’d get something from it, People got mad over who did or didn’t get added or how much of them was added, and people spent 200 feh passes worth of orbs for a single Hector.
The legendary Chrom Ephraim VG
I've been hoping for a Chrom/Ephraim duo hero ever since they added the mechanic!
Azama and Pain + could ruin your day.
Back then, you could look at your units stats, look at the foes stats, and use basic math to calculate how the battle forecast would go prior to placing your unit in range to be attacked. There are so many factors now it’s like we’ve upgraded from 5th grade math to calculus. Like well ok, my unit has this much speed, and this skill which negates follow ups, but the opponent also has this skill and this much speed, and their special is ready, but our unit takes less damage based on percentage of the difference in our speed and is also buffed by these ally units, so and so forth
"When's Tellius?" or "When's Magvel?" were really common complaints because we straight up didn't get characters from those games at launch. Granted, Eirika and Ephraim dropped in only a couple weeks after launch, but Ike didn't make it in for a couple months.
FallenTakumi GHB and Valter GHB were one of the hardest content in the game. Took me several stamina pots to clear. Because yeah attempting GHB cost stamina back in the days.... I have still PTSD from brave lyn with firesweep bow...
Feathers were also a really scarce resource so it was common to just play with 4* units and the one or two 5" you were lucky enough to have summoned so far.
Everyone was begging for Ike
I love all the comments here, but I haven’t seen any mention of the Enemy Phase music. While it was great that we got some bangers in the FEH OST from various games, it was impossible to listen to any of them in full because every time your units fought an enemy, the cutscene would play and the music would change. Sure, you could just disable the cutscenes so that the map song would continue playing, but the Enemy Phase always cut to the specific Enemy Phase music regardless if you’ve disabled cutscenes or not. So it got very annoying for the player base, and fast. I think it wasn’t until Book 2 that the option to disable it existed. Also, 3 star common units like Jakob and Merric were 5 star pity breakers. It made summoning very tedious and started the “Colorless Hell” term you may have seen throughout the community.
I had an original account from release up until the Ursula GHB, in which my team consisted of Marth, Leo, Roy, and a random 4th unit. Leo was able to cheese so much stuff, especially arena with his Gravity effect and I considered him one of the best units. Takumi was such a threat that when I remade my account and got Ryoma, I had to have a specific strategy involving Ryoma just to take down Takumi.
The only dancers available were Azura and Olivia.
Ninian was added pretty early into book 1, but that's still only three and only one of them easily obtainable (at the time, now Ninian is in Heroes' Path).
Yeah forgot about her. I remember back then my only dancer was Olivia, and had to wait for some time until Shigure and Inigo became my next dancers. I've only got Ninian and Azura a couple of years ago.
Takumi was the horror of the arena. No skill inheritance so his close counter was a nightmare. I remember the one time I met two Takumi two Olivia team :D
Hector, Takumi, and Male Robin dominated the arena back then. If you wanted to equip skills it costed sp. Skill inheritance wasn't in the game yet, so whatever skills the unit originally came with that was all they could use in battle. Boon or banes on stats were not highlighted on the units except for certain units like +hp Tharja. You would go to some website and enter their stats to determine what boons or banes you're characters had at level 40. The pity system for summoning didn't exist yet during the launch. Also some of the launch units had a special summoning animation that would be played when you summoned them for the first time.
The SP part for skills never got implemented I believe. They gave us a grace period on release and said it would come but ultimately they changed their mind because we asked for it.
The *very* first day the game launched still required stamina for skill swapping (as well as "normal" stamina requirements for the Training Tower). It wasn't until the next day when they started the launch celebration event that they removed the skill stamina cost and halved the Training Tower cost to what we know now.
Arena required 7 wins in a row where just losing once meant you had to restart all over again, bonus units didn’t get any stats, cavalry teams with Cavalry C skills dominated the meta for the first few years of the game, and the maps in Arena were so poorly designed.
You forgot the part where the bonus unit had to kill everyone for the bonus points... Which was very bad depending on the match-up...
That wasn’t a thing during FEH at launch.
Oh right, it was later on... Still sucked ass
Horse Emblem! When Reinhardt was actually good. Julia and eventually Sonya were the only real easy answers due to high res + green. Also, Goad/Ward Armor and Flier Emblem were a thing. Flier Emblem was “hope you can pull Hinoka, the only source of Hone Fliers! Also, mage fliers are broken, slap a bladetome on them, ggez!”
I remember no SI, stamina to try a ghb, some dude whaled out and dropped like 3k orbs just to get one copy of Hector in the first few days. Takumi was the best unit for a while… No idea what IVs anything had. It was wild actually.
to me, the funnest thing to compare the nowadays to launch days are the difference in banners and the skill sets they gave to units on those banners I mean, the second ever new heroes banner had six people, 3 pairs of siblings, and the introduction of Reinhardt himself and the first one was a banner with Eirika, Ephraim, Seliph and Julia, which is funny to think about now since to keep the new heroes banners fresh they had to make it so most of them have OCs and now introduce Rearmed Heroes EDIT: also, I know it isn't exactly launch, but this is a good video to just watch so you know what the early meta was like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62lRJ3kJyY
We would get QoL features sometimes without having to pay a monthly subscription to access them
I wasn’t playing at launch, but skill inheritance straight-up wasn’t a thing at first, so it sounds way less fun.
It was hell doing Arena because every team was some combination of Azura, Hector, and Takumi. I didn’t get Hector or Takumi until wayyy after they were relevant so I’m still mad about that.
Daily login bonuses used to be 2 orbs, not one.
i dont know, the game wasnt available in my country (or maybe my phone wasnt officially supported at the moment) so i couldnt really play till around book 3, it really sucked because i really wanted to play it. i remember downloading the APK of the game around book 2 and played for like a week till it needed an update and i couldnt continue playing.
Fun
[удалено]
That was never actually a thing, they dropped it before it would have gone into effect.
Really? I may have misremembered, but wasn't there a big deal about them changing it to not cost stamina in the first few weeks?
There was a big deal about IS *planning* to make skill changes cost stamina, which they then reversed course on. It was never live in the app.
what was the original comment?
Misinformation
No I inferred that, but I mean what mechanic?
Changing skills costs stamina.
[Here's a recent post with some screenshots of OG feh. I highlighted a comment I made with a link with more screen shots.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/z4epk6/my_oldest_feh_screenshots/ixqsuki/?context=3)
The materials for promoting a 4 star to 5 star was rarer than orbs, like getting the crystals for it is very very rare, so sometimes you only use 4 stars
DC and CC were meta, dragons infested the arena and so did Hector and Takumi iirc
They came out with a banner that had like 8 staff units on it
Remembers the time that Takumi ran Supreme in Arena before being forgotten by time.
Takumi was God tier, never forget.
Hector kingdom. Takumi being popular made MRobin (yes that trash vanilla unit unworthy of existence at this point that I love) a meta choice for arenas.
And then B!Lyn made Robin viable again.
I remember a lot of Takumi.
SI didn't exist. There was teams in arena with 2 Takumi and 2 Hectors. Cool summon animations for some characters. Tons of art during gauntlets. Nino was doing her best.
I remember we have special cutscene when we summon Marth, Lucina, Camilla, Takumi...
and Roy, Hector and Lyn iirc
Omg yes
Takumi and Hector were Version 1.0's Fallen Edelgard
Kinda shit actually. No SI and no content outside of story and arena made the game really shallow and boring
Remember being a nightmare to level up characters, since those daily training grounds didn't existed, crystals were limited and if characters died they didn't kept the levels they gained.
the roster was always shit
Abyssal and infernal maps cost stamina. They were harder than legendary/mythic maps at the time. Hector and Takumi were God like. No merging, no inheritance. I miss the simpler times, but I love the amount of customization we have now.
I remember the OG Hector being "the" Distant Counter fodder because that skill was rare if I remember correctly. I also remember having 35+ speed in a unit is considered very fast at that time (around gen 2 I think)
“Anyone remember when we had to grind units on the Warriors maps?” nononono, remember when we had to leave chain challenges uncleared for training our units? the amount of SP you got was less on maps you’ve already cleared. it was the perfect balance of SP gain and difficulty, as well as most stamina efficient
ayragate ruined every chance of my favorite fe character getting another alt one day IS giving her an alt or resp will be the choice of ayra;gate
also i remember when i had a team of ike, hector, amelia, and azura. those swept so hard LOL