Im unsure if i need to make this point, but perhaps i feel obligated to.
For one thing this is up to personal opinion, as for example i generally do love some of the non tutorial chapters on your list there. Such as Micky, BK & Jarod, but only in the sense that i like the chapter, i don’t like how the entire roster disappears off the base screen so i have to give paragon to her the chapter before.
But i think the other thing here is that the vanilla examples of this aren’t particularly intriguing maps to begin with. In that a single or double character chapter can certainly be interesting. Part of this is more that, I feel if you remove some of the more mild gimmicks that fire emblem does. The game will get more bland than it already tends to get. Especially were hacks are concerned.
In that things like fog of war and rain exist for particular reasons and purposes. Now do they work within the main titles? Not really, which is why rather than not doing them, rethink the way they should be done and do that. I know this community has a bit of an issue with liking the GBA games to the point were deviating from them within hacks is a bit sacrilege to what people like. But at least for me personally, id like for FE Hacks and Projects to be as Innovative if not more Innovative then what Intelligent Systems themselves are doing with their recent games.
I suppose my goal is to discourage the notions that they shouldn’t be made. Eitherway thank you for listening to my ted talk.
I mean Fates Conquest has the very stupid but very cool chapter 15 where you have only Corrin, Azura and Gunter and have to use the Replicate gimmick which is COMPLETELY optional but heavily incentivised by the stat boosters. It is honestly one of my favourite chapters from a gameplay perspective but has only 3 units.
I think most of these chapters suffer from a lack of openness in their design i.e. there is only one way to play the chapter. Chapter 15 of Conquest gives you lots of options for strategy as well as forcing you to learn, master and exploit a new system, like how having Corrin heal themselves on the easy side will also heal them on the hard side.
I like having mini vignettes of these things like Eyvel and Nanna vs. Mareeta in FE5 but they shouldn’t be in isolation and the player should be given ways to strategize around these elements
I found the Revelations replicate chapter interesting enough, other than that my opinion is pretty much the same as the ones in the first post. But that horse’s been dead so I’ll move on to some suggestions.
-It’s pretty difficult to make low unit count interesting, so I think the default first question should be “wouldn’t this be better off as a cutscene?”. Come up with gameplay reasons that make this story segment be worthy of being a chapter. If the gameplay detracts from the experience, it won’t be the story that will make that chapter enjoyable.
-Low unit count isn’t that much of an obstacle if the chapter doesn’t have the traditional blue-vs-red fighting gameplay. The chapter can be purely for lore or character building, just make sure you add an option to skip it if this is the case. Or it can have other kind of gameplay, maybe it’s the usual inventory management chapter, maybe it has an arena, maybe give the player options of units/items but they can’t pick all of them.
-If you really want to make a low unit chapter with the traditional gameplay, I’d recommend coming up with some other way to test the player along with it. Maybe the few units aren’t the star of that chapter, and you could give the player decisions each turn that heavily influence the gameplay. You can give the units some sort of special ability, such as ordering NPCs or triggering tile changes.
-If you’re willing to bend the “rule”, a safer option would be to make multiple low unit counts within the same chapter, as in, for example, giving the player 10 deployment slots, but they’re spread around the map in 5 pairs, that way the player has to capitalize on the synergy between each pair at first, and possibly about when they join with other pairs.
Judging by what seems to be the majority opinion, you shouldn’t try to follow vanilla if you want an interesting low-unit count chapter. The ones I found less unenjoyable were the one that had an interesting enough gimmick backing it up, or the ones that at least afforded the player some flexibility to tackle the challenge in different ways. I’m not confident at all I’d be able to make one myself, but those are the things I’d try to keep in mind if I were trying to.
Imo the only problem in that chapter is the lack of save point between map and BK fight
I still think more than 4-5 units early on is a no-no, as the player needs to get used to the characters and how they play. Suddenly dropping 10 units in chapter 1 is not a good idea.
I think there can be merit to such a chapter under some conditions.
Make the chapter a puzzle with only one correct answer. To that end eliminate all RNG (set enemy luck to 0 and give them skill that prevents criticals, make sure all weapons have 100% hit)
It could be an interesting chapter to throw in.
…And then on subsequent playthroughs you’ve already solved the puzzle, so it’s just a tedious timewaster which should have been a cutscene. This ain’t the solution.
I would argue the first playthrough is even more annoying since you have to figure it out by constantly restarting, similar to what midnight sun did for a chapter.
Puzzles are basically the antithesis of FE, due to locking you into doing specific actions to achieve victory when FEs entire thing is letting you customize your own experience. When you can only do one thing (and it’s not in a tutorial/mechanic teaching situation) it’s sort of spitting in the face of that very idea. This is why a single unit with a dancer or 1v1 chapter (mist is an optional character, her inclusion if anything makes it worse because she is the worse healer in fe9 but you need to train her to improve your chances of beating the black knight) are poor for the FE experience. You only have one solution. Either that solution is simple and the chapter is a filler, or the solution is difficult and you restart constantly. Or it’s again 27-2 where you can do everything right and still just lose to 2 Luna procs In a row.
I think this is more of an issue with FE9’s midgame than specifically with training Mist for the BK battle. Pretty much everyone you get in the midgame is underleveled/underpowered, and it seems like the player is expected to pick some of them and bless them with bonus experience (which always leads to the problem of having promoted units with poor weapon ranks). But think about the Beorc units you get from the time that the base menu becomes available until roughly the time when you invade Daein: Ilyana, Mist, Rolf, Marcia, Nephenee, Brom, Kieran, Zihark, Jill, Astird, Makolov, and Tormad (plus one prepromote that I can’t even remember if it’s Devdan or Danvad). Of that group, probably only Kieran and Jill are all that useful at base (maybe Ilyana for pure power), but even they are going to be dragging behind your mainstays for a while.
And I wouldn’t really say Mist is categorically worse than Rhys. She becomes mounted in a game where mounts are really strong and she has more offensive potential than Rhys. I always feed her two Arms Scrolls after she promotes and give her the Sonic Sword. Because Tellius is a land of extraordinarily weak tomes, Mist becomes one of the strongest magic units in your army (if I’m remembering correctly, the Sonic Sword has 3 more might than the strongest wind tome). I’m sure that’s a “bad” play by someone’s standards, but I don’t really care.
Maybe it’s an odd opinion, but i like these chapters just for their uniqueness, sometimes i feel like i’m doing the same thing over and over again in way too many chapters, and these story based kinda puzzley missions feel like a huge breath of fresh air. I also really appreciate attempts to put story over gameplay, even at the expense of the player. the difficulty could probably be improved by having some scripted rng moments for the “solution” to the puzzle, but even then i don’t think there is anything wrong with excessive difficulty for shorter chapters like these that won’t have you suffer much by resetting.
Also, Ike vs. bk is probaply one of my favorite moments in the entire game, Although i think they should have scaled the reinforcements with your mists level, there is almost nothing that could ruin the epicness of the encounter.