Fire Emblem is a franchise with a very broad cast. Fire Emblem is also a franchise that has to write around the potential absence of characters given the permadeath mechanic, which means that this broad cast can often feel weightless in the grand scheme of things. This mixture of ingredients can often rear its head in an especially ugly form when a mainline game, hack, or other project spends one or multiple chapters dedicated towards gathering allies or recruiting characters… only for those allies to contribute nothing to the story for the rest of the game.
This means that writing memorable FE side characters often involves piecing together how to make someone feel meaningful despite being ultimately optional. But what exactly is the formula to creating a character who feels like they contribute something substantial to the story, and how does one make their scenes feel impactful on the greater scope of the narrative?
Well, let’s welcome in the belle of the ball of today’s post and dig into this a bit.
Chandra (Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light)—making characters that matter
Chandra is a one-off boss from the cult of Ahribaal that the main plot decides to devote an entire gaiden to, and her chapter is the player’s first introduction to the cutthroat culture of Ahribaal and how they operate. This setup all leads into Ahribaal’s later atrocities very cleanly, especially when just a chapter later Orion sees what they’ve done to his homeland with his own eyes and is utterly disgusted by it.
Chandra herself is sent on a suicide mission into the home of the titular Maiden of Light and her dragon priests, which is a fact she clearly resents. She knows that she is a sacrifice in a game greater than her and she is not happy about it, but what can she really do? And if the player lacks the compassion to see her as more than the story device she is, well… she is very much capable of serving her intended purpose in the main plot through this chapter alone. The cast kills her, the player gets their first taste of the Ahribaal medicine, and then everyone moves on to confront bigger and more heinous villains.
You can tell that she isn’t recruitable because her unit description is primarily negative about her, and that only happens with bosses.
But as any interactive narrative worth its salt would do, the game leverages Chandra as an avenue to provide options for the player to shape the story experience.
If the player notices that Orion feels bad for her during the opening event and acts on that sentiment, they’ll discover that…
…the tactician is correct and there is in fact no easy talk option between them to recruit her. Tough luck.
But there is a battle quote if they fight.
And if you obtain that quote as a skilled player should, Orion knocks her out and stops the others from killing her and Chandra properly joins the party.
I really love this recruitment. I love how it’s more than just a boring and straightforward “talk” marked by an obvious indicator bubble, and how it doesn’t show its full hand until after the chapter is over. I could go on about how amazing it felt to discover on my own that this random boss with a design that isn’t conventionally attractive by anime standards was actually spareable, and how much I adore how DLATMOL rejects attractiveness as a visual indicator of playability, but you can just read my effortpost about Alva if you want more about that.
Now, Chandra is not a character who significantly alters the plot trajectory of Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light. But having her along for the ride makes the game feel different than if she weren’t there: her presence and using her as a unit adds fresh layers to the story that pretty much no other character in the game could replicate with equal effectiveness.
Seeing the factions through her eyes sets the stage for later things to come: how she sees the gang sparing her as futile when she’s convinced the dragon priests would leap to execute her anyways, how her boss is a cult leader named Weaver who is more than happy to spend lives like currency, and how she makes a very peculiar observation about the Maiden of Light’s home that would probably earn her an immediate execution if Freesia was in the room.
Out of the player cast so far, all of these contributions could’ve only been provided by Chandra. Her perspective is unique from the rest of the party—sure, there technically is another Ahribaalite, but he hasn’t been home in a while and doesn’t have the same view of the Sect’s inner machinations as Chandra does. And she is acutely conscious of how the other cultures of Brauma perceive the Ahribaalites as scum and wants to piece apart how that came to be. So all the dialogues she gets past this point add layers to the story that others can’t, and in doing so she also makes the screentime dedicated to her prior feel more weighty in retrospect.
But how is she as a unit?
I benched her once, and it was by far the least fun DLATMOL run I’ve ever completed
Let’s just say that most people who choose to field Chandra will likely be motivated by reasons outside of a pure gameplay vacuum. She joins alongside a much better unit (Freesia) and probably struggles to stand up to your other magic users from before. She basically only has two stats that are good… but she excels in both beyond compare.
And fortunately for her, her story setup as a defector from the enemy forces means it’s easy for a blind player to correctly intuit that she has a number of boss quotes later down the line… and that basically amounts to a golden ticket for long term deployment and investment in my book.
It is genuinely a lot of fun to find her a place in the party and etch out approaches to maps that make the most of her niche strengths. Her stellar magic means that she can always contribute with chip damage here and there even if her ORKOs aren’t super common, and after promotion she can heal more with a Heal staff than any of your stafflocked units could dream of. And come lategame, a particular item appears that benefits her a lot: the S-rank Dark tome that you get from visiting Ahribaal.
big number good. send tweet
Dunbaalze weighs her down a fair bit, but her speed is unreliable and it’s not like she wants to be taking hits anyways. It also has huge might, good accuracy, and 3X effectiveness against monsters—and monsters are generally some of the more dangerous enemies in the game, especially in lategame where enemies are all pretty scary, so being able to do enough damage to oneshot is often really convenient. And no one else in the game has magic quite like Chandra’s, so she’s the most likely candidate to hit oneshot thresholds for a wide breadth of enemies beyond just monsters too. It’s not the kind of thing that will break the game in two, but it really helps her feel like she has a distinct niche in a nice way.
Do you need Chandra oneshots to win the game? Of course not, just like the story technically doesn’t need Chandra’s recruitment to function. But her gameplay utility and the story flavor she provides mirror each other: they add enough to the experience that it makes her feel important even if she is not structurally essential per se.
The events, supports, and interactions that she does get past her recruitment are excellent at utilizing her as a conduit, drawing out new sides of existing story beats in a form that feels like it is uniquely hers. Her presence expands upon Orion’s story in interesting ways, adding some warmly welcomed subtext to certain events in the main plot. Her familiarity with the Sect sheds light on a particular character who comes off very surface-level in every dialogue he gets… except in his interactions with her. She even gets some cute little moments of her own to shine, like when she detects an enemy ambush by realizing that their attackers are using the exact same illusion tactic on the party that she used in her recruit chapter and promptly dispels the illusions with ease.
There is one particular dialogue with her that I found very satisfying to encounter: a little scene that highlights how she is one of the very first characters who starts to catch onto a really important detail about the game’s lore. Of course, the protagonists manage to eventually sleuth it out too, and the main story makes it engaging for them to uncover the truth just as well… but it’s Chandra’s unique perspective that allows her to start putting the pieces together before they do, which also lays down a solid foundation of hints to properly prime the player for the eventual reveal. I won’t say where this dialogue is—and hell, it’s not too hard to find if you’re using her—but it’s been years since my first DLATMOL run and I still remember how thrilling it was to find it.
Get a load of this gal.
In general, I think DLATMOL is a game that rewards those who really try to dive into it, arguably moreso than a lot of projects. Some story-focused hacks like The Dark Amulet and its sequel prefer to present all of their coolest bits front and center, so that it’s impossible for a player to miss them. And I understand why a developer would want to do this! But with DLATMOL, a player could very easily just… completely miss out on so many of its coolest parts if they don’t care to search for them, and Chandra is no exception. The more you explore the game the more layers you’ll find to add to the narrative, and the story experience will be all the more engaging as a result.
I think there’s something very special about a story element that is technically optional but adds so much value to the narrative experience to the point where one might even argue that it should’ve been unmissable, and I think that DLATMOL is really good at making discoverable elements like these really rewarding and satisfying to look for. In that light, I almost kind of think that a part of what makes Chandra so cool and neat to me is that she’s missable at all despite how much she brings to the table. There’s almost an unspoken vibe of player agency here: you recruited this character, you invested in them and found them a niche despite having little pragmatic reason to do so, and you brought a new angle to your story experience as a result.
also, she is the only recruitable woman in the game who Darius apparently doesn’t find attractive enough to defect to your side for, and all that tells me is that Darius is a moron because HOW can you say no to a lady with more than four boss quotes