I have a simple question. What things do you enjoy or how do you have fun in fire emblem? I know that everyone has different tastes, and when I make hacks, I put things in it that I find enjoyable or that I think they would fit in nicely Here, I write stuff that I like. Tell me if you agree, disagree, or you find other things that you enjoy but I missed.
Things that I like
-Having every single unit be viable, aka, no bad units
-Est archetype: I like seeing lots of stats rise up each level up
-Optional bosses that drop loots when defeated in defense/survive chapters
-Powerful tools being given to the player and plenty situations to use them
-Constant difficulty curve with no peaks or stinky chapters
-Varied and relatively powerful enemies that take more than 1 round of combat to bring down
-Buffed bows
-Classes like mages, armors, archers, wyverns
-Good assets (portraits, music, battle anims…)
-Gameplay story integration
-Cool map gimmicks
-Engaging story (not Engage’s story)
-Checking enemy inventories
-Planning around a strategies that utilizes all of my tools available: generally, I do the opposite of hoarding, which consist
-Have some room for error: not everyone is a super pro player, and sometimes we make mistakes. It would be cringe to lose 12 turns of gameplay for a small hiccup. In general, most people won’t use savestates to “fix” thier misplacements, and as a game designer, you should give some leeway to players
-having lots of units, about 1-2 new units per chapter, just in case I lose some along the way
-Having units from different places of the continent/setting
-Exploring the continent/setting, if not all of it, at least most of it, during the gameplay
-I tend to like plot driven narrative more than character driven narrative
-I like effective weapons (bows, horse-slayer, armor-slayer). Seeing the weapon flashes with effective powers make my brain go brrrr
-More powerful weapon triangle: +/-1 damage and +/-15 hit doesn’t do for me
-Impactful Magic triangle: add more enemy mages and magic classes. I’d love to see the magic triangle implemented in its full potential
-New weapons: go bonkers with crazy weapon ideas!
-Personal weapons: one of the reasons I like 4K
-Personal skills: one of the reasons I like CC
-Anti turtle incentives: villages in dangers, chest to be looted by thieves, a dangerous recruitable with a REASONABLE recruitment system (I’m looking at you, fe5). All things that incentivize the playe to push forward and take risks..calculated risks.
-Complete level up (+1 in all stats when doing a level up)
Things that I DON’T like
-Shacky hitrates (I’m looking at you, fe6)
-Crappy units (Gwendy,Sophia,Rebecca…)
-Sudden difficulty spikes
-Having one or two enemy classes for one chapter (fe8 chapter 1 to 4, fe6 chapter 1-2)
I don’t dislikes those chapters, but I find them boring
-Very strict time limits: I’m not a slow player, but sometimes, I feel like I don’t have enough turns to do the basic win condition.
-Very shorts chapters: nothing bad with that, it’s just that I prefer to spend at least 10 turn in a chapter, otherwise I feel like that I’m not tasting the map properly. It’s just a me thing. I get the feeling that the map is more of a tutorial than a proper chapter.
-Some map gimmicks are not for me: I don’t like desert chapters whose sand can impeded most of your units movement (in general, I don’t like having terrain that reduces the speed of your units t a crawl).
-Having supports take ages to develop.
-Having a very cool unit with a cool portrait and unique class share only 2 lines of dialogue. C’mon, I like this unit, I’d love to learn more about this guy!
-Having your jeigan be unable to set up kills for other units. I know that Jeigan are often accused of stealing xp, but I really wanna give that juicy xp to my units
-About story, I’m kinda tired of the medieval setting. I’d prefer to explore other types of
contexts, like ancient rome, china, japan, india, pre columbian america, north africa, etc. The world has plenty of hystory, not just fantasy medieval.
-I don’t like puzzle emblem. That is, when there’s only one good sequence of moves to complete a chapter. It makes the experience feel like homework, like a series of accurate calculations, without any room for error or creativity
-Conversely, I don’t like very easy games, as it removes stakes, and so, removes the satisfaction of completing a map.
-Overtuned enemies. I like when the average foe needs 1-2 rounds of combat, max 3 rounds, to fall down. However, having 4-5-6 rounds of combat is ridiculous. It makes the units feel like Raiden when he punches Armstrong. At least, I hope that my horse slayers unit can at least oneshot the cavalier. No? It survives with over 50% of its hp? Bad unit and bad weapon.
-Ambush spaws: nuff said
-Skill bloat: sometimes, when the enemy has 5-6 skills, I tend to forget them, and pay the price.
-Vanilla skill system: like above, I don’t like when foes have impaler or luna as their class skill.
-Units with 0 luck: enjoy getting 3% critted, cause I won’t.
-Relentless and mindnumbing spam of status staves, siege tomes and brave weapons. Use those tool with care!
-Overtuned jeigan that can carry your run on your back and even make ice cream while he delivers the final blow to the final boss.
-0 stat level ups. Sometimes it happens, and it stinks.
-Late game syndrome. I don’t like when the endgame its just rout,rout,rout. Spice things up! You don’t need to have 5-6 chapters of rout with thousands of foes and 20 player deployment slots. You can make defense maps, defeat boss, visit x villages, having 12-14 deployment slots.
-Empty maps: like above, I don’t like when, after defeating 50% of the foes, I have to move all my units towards the objective, fe4 style. Make sure that the map is filled with stuff, like villages, cool environment, distributed enemy forces. Make sure that the player has always something to do