Why I Auto Battle the Clashes and Still Clear Every Room

I went into Niraga Mine for a hair clip and came out with a playstyle.

The mine is a small thing — a girl in Dagsion lost something, I took the job for the Renown, and the mine is where it ended up. What I actually did in there was spend a long time opening chests, smashing every crate the game would let me smash, following side passages that obviously led nowhere, and eventually walking out of a back door I would never have found if I had just grabbed the clip and turned around.

I enjoyed every minute of that.

I enjoyed almost none of the fighting in between.

That gap had been bothering me for about three days, and the mine is where it finally resolved into something I could write down.

The game is running two different fights

This is the bit that took me longer to notice than it should have, because both of them are just called "combat" in my head.

Those are not two flavours of the same thing. They ask for completely different attention. A Match is a puzzle I am solving with people. A Clash is a rotation I am executing.

And I have executed this rotation before.

I already played this game on a phone

I put a genuinely embarrassing number of hours into Star Trek: Legends, and before that into one of the Star Wars character-collection games. I liked them. I liked unlocking someone new and working out what their whole kit did and which three people they wanted standing next to them.

Then, in both, the same thing happened. I understood it. The teams stopped being a question. And I turned on auto, set the speed as high as it would go, and stopped watching.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean. It is not a complaint about the game. It is a fact about me, and about the four hundred hours I spent somewhere else before I got here.

It is not just me

I went looking for this specifically, because "I am bored" and "this is repetitive" are very different claims and only one of them is worth recording.

Reviewers who finished the whole game got to the same button. Nintendo Life describes auto-battling most of them once they become frequent. Game Informer mentions the same fatigue. Pocket Tactics is the blunt one: the dungeon fights do not get more interesting later.

That last one matters more than the other two, because it kills the plan I would otherwise have defaulted to — play them properly for now, it probably opens up. There is no evidence for that, and quite a lot against it.

The failed skip is the part I like most about this rule. I do not have to predict which fights are dangerous. The game tells me, for free, and it costs me one button press to find out.

No, I am not skipping the Fire Emblem

The fear underneath all of this was that automating Clashes was a polite way of saying I had stopped playing the game.

It is not, and the reason is structural: the Clash is not the campaign. The grid maps are. They are where the story battles happen, where the army I have been building actually gets used, and where Part II and Part III go when the scale opens up. Automating the dungeon skirmishes does not remove a single Match from my save.

I will also say the quiet part: the walkthroughs recommend skipping routine dungeon encounters on Standard. When the people writing the guides say the fight is not the content, I can stop feeling clever about agreeing with them.

Story is the one thing I checked twice. For an ordinary group of dungeon enemies, the plot is not inside the fight — it is in the scene before, the scene after, and the thing you walked in there to find. Event Clashes are closer to the story, so I watch my way in and out of those, and if one looks unusual I use Auto Battle at speed rather than skipping it outright. I have not found anything promising that a skip preserves every last piece of battle chatter, so I am not going to claim it does.

The exploring is a completely separate opinion

Here is where I want to be emphatic, because "I automate the fights" reads like "I rush the dungeons" and it is nearly the opposite.

When I go into a dungeon, I clear it. Every path, every breakable, every chest against the counter, the materials, and the back exit when the Uncharted marker says there is one to find. That is not diligence and it is not optimization. It is just the part I like. The fights are the toll I pay to keep looking in rooms.

There is a practical argument too, and it is worth knowing before the habit gets talked out of you: the dungeons keep paying. Materials now, Warrior's Soulstones later, and five specific ones eventually hold the Keys of the Diadem. "I automate Clashes" must never quietly become "I ignore dungeons", because those are the same places.

The city rule, which is the same rule in a different coat

Dagsion had been doing something similar to me on a smaller scale.

Every time the story moved, I would walk the entire city and talk to everybody, because something might have changed. Sometimes something had. Usually a man told me about his cart for the fourth time.

That one is worth more to me than it looks. It converts an open-ended "did I miss something" into a five-minute lap with an end.

What I actually decided

The version of this game I want to play is not a compromise and it is not a shortcut. It is three sentences:

Explore everything. Automate the routine Clashes. Save the real attention for the maps.

I like Fortune's Weave. I like the tactical battles a great deal, and I like walking around inside its places nearly as much. What I do not like is executing the same four-turn rotation in a corridor for the ninth time this evening — and I have finally stopped treating that as a character flaw I need to play through.

This is how I get to the end of an enormous game instead of stalling out in chapter nine.