Fire Emblem and similar games usually find a way to narratively introduce droves of generic enemies to back up a powerful boss, whether that be the faceless, ever-loyal army of the evil kingdom, or the hordes of monsters commanded by the evil god. And it makes sense, Fire Emblem maps are entirely built around your units clashing with a large army of enemies
But I was curious. Could smaller-scale “boss fights” ever work in a game like Fire Emblem? Fights against either a small, elite group of enemies that’s equal to or smaller than your army, or even fights against a single powerful boss with no enemies to back them up?
I don’t exactly think it’d be possible, but I’m curious to hear what the people on this forum think. Admittedly the strong suit of an SRPG like Fire Emblem is being able to portray large-scale battles that most RPGs can’t really do justice to, but I think it does have a weakness when it comes to the kinds of fights that typical RPGs excel at, that being the smaller fights where you’re up against like 1-5 enemies at any given time
I totally believe it can be done, however it would be a huge departure from what people are used to and might get filed under “this doesn’t belong in my FE games”.
I’ve realized that Fire Emblem is an extremely adaptable game but you’re always fighting an uphill battle against what other people want or expect to see and their opinions of FE’s identity. You’re also fighting another battle against what does and doesn’t make sense in the context of story or power scaling against the rest of the game’s enemies.
Boss fights like Ashera are an example of how you can turn a single enemy unit into “the level”. Although I think that fight still uses reinforcements but the basic idea is in the direction.
A single boss character could have colossal HP, game mechanics unique to that battle, special skills, different allowances and disallowances on how to approach them, terrain puzzles, positioning limits, repositioning mechanics like teleportation, equipment changing, AoE attacks, status condition warfare, effective damage management, stat or level manipulation, terrain changes, and many other ideas and combinations thereof. Modding limitations aside, someone programming an new FE game from scratch could incorporate a great many different ideas into such a boss fight and combine them in many crazy ways to customize whatever type of boss experience they want within the FE turn based formula.
But again, you hit that HARD wall of “Will people accept this?” and I think most people breaking their backs to work on FE games (both modders and official titles alike) are afraid to poke the bear of traditions and risk having all their work rejected
FE has already done chapters you describe. Off the top of my head, there is the final chapter of FE7, where aside from a few unnamed morphs you face off against a small handful of strong named characters, each one with unique weapons. PoR of course has the Ike vs Black Knight duel chapter. Awakening’s Deadlords chapter has solely the 12 deadlords and Aversa. 3H made an effort in creating an explicit category of boss enemies through the giant enemies, and a few of the paralogues have you up against a small handful of giant enemies (like the Marianne paralogue).
None of them rank at the top of map ranking lists, but I don’t see a lot of complaints about them specifically either (aside from Moment of Fate). There’s nothing that makes them inherently worse than standard chapters.
That being said, FE is a game designed for using a small player force against large groups of enemies, so it twists and snaps when you try to force it into becoming a 1v1 dueling engine. Moment of Fate is a good example of this, it is an infamous RNG fest where you need to bet on an Ike with good stats rolling Aether or run, but even if the Black Knight were not so absurdly powerful, would it really be engaging? You trained Ike, so you move him forward and hit BK until he dies, maybe healing him with Physic if needed, or you didn’t train Ike so you just escape. (be happy there’s even an Escape option lol. The forced 1v1 fight with Wiegraf in FFT doesn’t even have that option. So if you weren’t prepared, and saved over your save, well…)
While it’s not particularly what you’re talking about, a handful of chapters in Sacred Stones Reforged (a hack by Struedelmuffin) has a bunch of stronger mini-boss type enemies in a handful of chapters that exist to challenge the player and if beaten, reward you with a strong/useful weapon (mainly effective weaponry like the Heavy Spear & Zanbato).
They’ve been done in vanilla as was mentioned, and probably in romhacks as well though I can only really recall one example I experienced.
They key to making one-boss chapters is to understand that there’s only so much you can do with just one unit. Even if your idea for a boss is really just Big Chungus, the most you can do is give him 120 HP or that skill that halves received damage without entering questionable territory (excessive HP regeneration, obnoxiously high DEF/RES, RNGfest, proc skills, etc.). Rather than limiting yourself to the unit, realize that you can make the map and events interact with them, and that is to me the most effective way of making these kinds of chapters interesting.
The simplest way to do it is through health-bars, while not a native mechanic to vanilla GBAFEs (and to my knowledge, hasn’t been implemented via engine hacks either), you can just re-spawn a boss multiple times. You can change their stats and AI around for narrative cohesion, as in the closer they’re pushed to defeat, the more desperate they get so their str/spd increase but their skl/def decrease and their AI becomes more reckless, etc.
You can make a boss that is invulnerable to physical attacks on odd turns and to magical attacks on even turns by swapping their stats around in events.
You can add ways to debuff them or whittle them down, like with traps or other event-based methods like “every chest you open in this map poisons the boss”, “every time he’s attacked his def/res lower by 1”, “every time you let him initiate combat against a blue unit, a strong green units spawns”, etc.
You can make them easily depressed when it rains, and make an event where the player can make it rain, so the boss stops initiating attacks and you don’t have to worry about enemy phase.
You can make them split parts of himself to make more minions, and every time the player defeats a minion the boss takes direct damage.
These are just some ideas that come to mind to exemplify my point. Stat-balls don’t really get you that far, so if you want to push the FE mechanics to something it doesn’t usually do, you have to be creative.
The first thing that came to mind was that one map in Gaiden/Echoes where you fight against 3 paladins on Alm’s route. It’s during Act 3 at a point where you’re still mostly fighting cavaliers, so I found it to be pretty memorable. Your army is also split up into 3 groups, making the most dominant strategy of clumping your units together in a giant ball of death harder to do.
I think this sort of idea works best in a game like Gaiden since most of those maps are bite-sized challenges to overcome rather than the fully fledged chapters that we see in the rest of the series. But really you can do basically any idea you want. If that type of map would help the story, then do it.
Funnily enough Gaiden was part of what inspired this post. Though admittedly those maps are… Very uninteresting. I like Gaiden, but it’s definitely an example of what not to do in map design
Would be really cool to see the series try a game with bite-sized maps again honestly, I feel like the concept has potential
