Do you realise how much easier having no penalties for death makes things? It allows a lot of crazy suicide strats. You can just send a strong unit into a problem area, have them lure, kill or weaken most enemies and have everyone else clean up, repeat if necessary with another strong unit, you have a full ~15 unit army to do that with. and the lost experience is no big deal since they can just catch up on the next map, no penalties at all. Just go full phoenix, it’s much more honest and entertaining.
you’re speaking as if everyone plays fire emblem like you. What if some people don’t like perma-death and don’t want to completely take away the challenge with phoenix mode? Perma-death is not a matter of whether you want a challenge with fire emblem or not, casual mode doesn’t take away all the challenge, not everyone will use suicide strats like you may, why is using casual mode less honest? Do you realise how many different types of fire emblem fans there are? by only having “HaRdCoRe TrUe InTeNdEd MoDe” and a glorified story only mode you alienate potential new fans from the series, and unless you don’t like the community growing, casual mode is a necessity for this day and age, it’s not cheating, it’s a different way of play.
I’m sorry if this sounds rude this comment just really ticked me off
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Phoenix Mode is actually awesome for completionists who just want to collect all supports, etc. without the need to replay it over and over again fully focused. But for normal playthrough I’d always reccomend Casual Mode over Phoenix Mode. In the end if Casual mode wouldn’t exist, people would simple reset. So it’s basically a way to save time. Similar to time wheel. But I wrote enough about this topic earlier.
Speaking of Casual Mode. I’ve been thinking about methods to encourage players to be more careful in that mode as well. I think the idea of dark Deity to lower a stat was a good start. But I think 1 stat alone isn’t enough. Of course over time it would be crap if that character dies and dies over and over. A more subtle but over time noticeable punishment imo woul be to decrease the potential. Like -5% growth on every stat per death. At first nothing to big. But the more often they die… Basically trade the “heroes will return after the battle” to “heroes will return after the Battle but their potential might be lower due to injuries.” A subtile hint but nothing more. I’d like to try it out at some day.
I personally believe that giving the players a scale they can set from 0% to 100% subtracted growths on death when starting the game would make casual modes a lot more ‘casual friendly’ while still keeping the game a challenge for those that want it, hell give them a negative growths option to where if the characters repeatedly die their growths go into the negatives, it’s all about making these types of things optional to me.
That is honestly a horrid idea since it would further deincentivize the player from using anything other then the overpowered units. It would also completely defeat the point of what phoenix mode is ment to do, which is be piss easy and remove the punishment of a unit falling in battle.
What i think would be a better idea is the unit falling it battle has a random weapon in their inventory pilfered by the enemy that beat them or the unit getting respawned back at the deploy point as to still punish the player for letting a unit die, but without potentially crippling their units.
Also negative growth is not a good idea that should ever be considered for a hack/actual game. It was a stupid meme idea mekkah and mangs had and should stay that way.
I meant this as an addition to casual mode, phoenix mode was fine IMO no changes necessary, my idea was to just give the option of reducing growths every death as a stipulation for casual mode, from 0-100% growth loss, the negative growths idea is no better than lunatic reverse or hard 5 difficulty, it’s an insane difficulty not play tested or curated just for the hell of it.
the weapon idea just incentivizes the use of iron weapons and can only build a habit of hoarding, I am overall against the idea of adding any punishments for casual mode and if any punishment were added, they should above all be optional.
The idea of this concept is that at first 5% aren’t that much. However there will be a consequence of lower and lower chances for a unit to level up certain stats if they die repeatedly. This is to still give the player a reason to be more mindful about their decisions while keeping alive the units they like without any progress loss. There should be of course a limit that growths wouldn’t fall in negative areas. Which could be done by simple making the punishment only for the character growth. Every class in Fire Emblem nowadays has own growth rates that are added on top of a characters personal growths. So the unit itself could have 0% personal growths in the end but will always be able to grow due to class growths. But in the end what I wanted to say is that this’d be my solution for giving more impact on descisions in casual mode. Which could also be combined with a stat loss system similar to Dark Deity.
I don’t think that the player should (or, aside from mods, will) be able to modify the ammount of growth loss. Growth Rates have always stayed hidden from the player in the official games. The idea of casual mode is that players don’t have to worry about units dying. Which, especially considering their design descisions in future games being focused on the fact that many players dislike the permadeath, caused a less Permadeath-focused design philosophy.
By saying that the players who play Casual Mode don’t have to worry about units dying forever but still implying that it’s important that they don’t leave the battlefield too often due to injuries, you would have an immersive explanation on why it’s important to think/play in a way that your units won’t die, and a reason to design the games more in a way again that acknowledges that characters might need to be replaced. If things like monasteries, villages, etc. become a thing again, you could even use areas of these to help units to recover from their injuries in order to get their lost growths back. Which would need some kinds of ressources in exchange.
The idea with the randomly removed weapon is actually something I tried out before (only that I threw away all the items of the unit) and personally I didn’t like it too much. Officially speaking, they even nerved that aspect since Shadow Dragon - Units that died don’t lose their inventory again. Which is probably a good descision. But I can live with that too.
I think a fixed (but smaller) punishment would be the best way to make Casual Mode more strategically/giving Casual Mode more consequences for the decisions made in it. If there aren’t too big consequences for this mode and the games design is focused on it, a mode where a player can miss stuff but not recover from the loss of characters (or only very limited) then the Classic Mode suffers from it, as we have seen in Three Houses.
A player who never tried out playing with Permadeath or tries it out the first time in Three Houses, could actually call this form of Classic Mode (especially in the Ashen Wolves DLC where you have no way to recruit new units at all) a Hardcore True Intended Mode in the eyes of fans who experienced games of a time where there was only that - Permadeath. And they praise it and tell us how much better that time was. No Casual Mode that would give us the option from experiencing a playthrough where we would not be able to replace the units we’ve lost… Except that this isn’t the case at all. At least not for most games… (Looking at you, Radiant Dawn)… Plus the part with the community telling that it’s better.
For the Classic Mode to work without reaching this definition the game must be designed in a certain way. Or have some options to recover from units death. Which of course sounds a bit strange since we play Classic Mode/without resetting to experience unit deaths. But the reason why we need these recovery options (a way to revive units in games with smaller casts or simple a large cast to have enough replacement options) is to make it so that the Classic Mode is not that - A Hardcore (Not) Intended Way to play this game. Of course it’s cool to chill and if you don’t like permadeath you are free to reset/play without it. But the beauty of permadeath is the fact that a story where everything goes well and according to plan, isn’t always the most fun/interesting experience. And with the Classic Mode being less and less focused on in modern games, this beauty is slightly taken away in the original games. Which is at least what I feel.
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That’s why possibly redeploying the unit could also be a punishing idea since it would make mistakes on escape maps more painful since you could end up with units trapped behind the chaser units.
I’m use to normal mode when someone dies, they die for ever but I don’t really have problems with Causal. It’s simply,
For causal mode, If you want all you character to be alive in the ending or support reason and More than causal mode is good.
For Normal mode, If you want to experience what war really feels like or let that character die due to miss place. Then causal mode is perfect for you. It’s almost like Shadow Dragon. if you want to recruit some secret character, then you most kill a lot of your units.
This is only my idea of Causal mode and normal mode.
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Eh, even fire emblem doesn’t exactly do the whole “war is hell” thing particularly well.
In most forms fire emblem centers around a fairly small platoon performing as an elite strike force that hits an enemy army hard and fast to maximize damage and minimize losses.
Talking from a pure numbers perspective a platoon losing a single soldier means nothing in a war since hundreds of people are dying or are crippled in a single battle, and are replaced as fast as possible.
Funny enough shadow dragon’s replacement generics is the closest to actual war fielding the series has ever gotten.
Another problem fire emblem has with all of this is when a single person dies in combat on the battlefield it tries to make it have impact when honestly it having no impact only for it to come up/across as callous and cold does it hold weight.
Most units having no narrative impact also exacerbates the flaws further.
Like, would it kill to have a few officers bring up who they replaced or have grudges against in the players forces, or extra chapters against mercenary bands sent after the player due to their performance in the war.
Anywho, that was a random tangent i felt i needed to have here.
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