The order of the chiral phase transition of lattice QCD with unimproved staggered fermions is
known to depend on the number of quark flavours, their masses and the lattice spacing. Previous
studies in the literature for $𝑁_f ∈ \{3, 4\}$ show first-order transitions, which weaken with decreasing
lattice spacing. Here we investigate what happens when lattices are made coarser to establish
contact to the strong coupling region. For $𝑁_f ∈ \{4, 8\}$ we find a drastic weakening of the transition
when going from $𝑁_𝜏 = 4$ to $𝑁_𝜏 = 2$, which is consistent with a second-order chiral transition
reported in the literature for $𝑁_f = 4$ in the strong coupling limit. This implies a non-monotonic
behaviour of the critical quark or pseudo-scalar meson mass, which separates first-order transitions
from crossover behaviour, as a function of lattice spacing.