Fire Emblem is a game about making decisions, and one of the most prevalent of those is picking out who kills whom. It’s through these decisions that heroes of a given playthrough emerge—whether it’s through coming in clutch with a much-needed hit / crit, or killing a story-important boss, or contributing meaningfully to the playthrough in some other form. I’ve said this before, but it’s because of this that I really think FE is ultimately a story simulator at its core. With every decision that a player makes, they add another sentence to the war story that they’re writing.
This story-generation factor, in my opinion, is an irreplaceable part of what makes a Fire Emblem unit interesting to use—it is the beating heart of what makes this game’s mechanics fun for me. If I feel like using a unit will contribute meaningfully to the quality of the story that my playthrough is penning, it will make every decision that involves them gripping and engaging for me regardless of their actual stats, gimmicks, or gameplay traits.
As a result of this, units who have a lot of room to grow narratively often find themselves at center stage of my playthroughs. In vanilla, I find this factor often comes out vividly with characters who are framed as nobodies or underdogs. Seeing a character who’s been beaten down by those around them and has never truly gotten their chance to shine, and giving them that chance through gameplay, is such a surefire way to achieve this effect that it may as well be cheating.
But why stop there? Raw gameplay alone without any script support isn’t the only way to handle this… nor is it the most effective, in my opinion. For a slightly different approach, look no further than Sam from TMGC.
She’s an early-game archer—a fresh recruit who barely knows how to shoot at all despite coming from a family of esteemed archers. She’s the youngest daughter of a minor house, overlooked by most everyone both within and outside her family. She doesn’t think she’s set out for this war business at all, and she doesn’t expect herself to contribute in the slightest. And while she’s not horrible when she joins you, her performance is still pretty underwhelming compared to most of your other recruits at the time.
But as the journey continues, Sam slowly yet surely finds confidence in herself. She gets better at acknowledging her strengths, rather than doubting herself at every turn. She confronts and overcomes her many personal fears—darkness, brutish-looking people, you name it. She gradually finds ways to help her companions and pull her weight in the army. It’s a simple yet heartwarming story arc.
Now think about how much more weight all of those story developments carry if the player also invested in her gameplay, too.
Suddenly all of your prior gameplay decisions tie in directly with her narrative growth. Did you take out a key enemy with her, one which would’ve killed one of your units on enemy phase had she not been there? In doing so, you allowed her to prove her own competence and value through gameplay… and you gave her even more of a reason to acknowledge her skills and talents like she does in the dialogue. Did she solo a major boss for you, like the dragon in Chapter 12? Then it makes perfect sense why she’s not afraid of the dark or bandits or isolation anymore; stuff like that is nothing to her when she took on a general, or an entire dragon, or some other threat three times her size… and came out on top in the end.
As a whole, Sam is a character whose personal story is reinforced rather thoroughly by the Fire Emblem SRPG system of gameplay, and that’s the meat of what makes units like her so much fun to play with. I’ve seen a handful of characters who excel at creating effects like this in hacks, but if I had to compare her to a vanilla character, it would probably be Arden from Genealogy: a character who, if given the chance by the player, actually acknowledges how far they’ve come within the environment of that playthrough’s story. And Sam’s personal arc, like Arden’s, is significantly enhanced by the time and effort that the player puts into giving her a chance and making her great.
The hidden text on the Passacaglia says it more concisely than I could: you are the path along which she has come so far. You are the one who wrote Sam’s story. You went out of your way to guide her to her true potential, and the story rewards you appropriately for it.