Analysis time! Well… what passes for analysis, anyway.
General FE
There’s no conclusions in this that you can’t draw for yourself. The favourites graph runs clockwise; FE5 and FE10 are split on 16 favourites each, FE7 a shade behind with 15, FE8 on 12. Every FE had someone willing to stick their neck out for them.
Community Engagement
People are broadly Discord-curious. Some encouragement to make hack discords, and I can say from experience they do attract enough buzz to justify the sidebar slot. Most FEU people have at least joined the server at some stage.
Most of us have been here for a fair wedge of time. The big boom seems to have been 3-5 years ago, so that isn’t wholly surprising. The vast majority of us have completed a campaign, too, as you’d expect; most of us, a handful, and around half of us have probably spent well over a hundred hours playing fan-made Fire Emblem, which I think is fantastic.
Around half of us have replayed a campaign. If you’re making your campaign around the assumption nobody will replay it, this may be happily mistaken.
A substantial minority prefer ‘full-length’ campaigns, but there’s not going to be a substantial community prejudice against smaller experiences.
Happily, most of us are willing to give incomplete campaigns a shot, and if you’re one of the 21%, I’d implore you to try - particularly if you’re hoping for feedback for your own campaign. The earlier you can give and receive feedback, the more useful it winds up being and the more substantially it can help reshape a game for the better.
Priorities
A lot of these wound up looking like flipped birds.
It’s kind of a messily open question. Does a 3* Portrait Quality indicate simply that someone will appreciate exceptional portraits to Some degree, or does it mean that someone expects them to be at least Alright, and is more indifferent past that point? So too for writing. I doubt I’m alone in saying I’d prefer a short bad story to a long-winded mediocre one, a near-nonexistent one to either, and even a competent story can be brought low if it’s riddled with typos. Some of that texture was attempted to be captured in the questions that followed, but… it’s imperfect.
So what can we draw from this?
First up - unsurprisingly, in my book - I interpret the two writing graphs as meaning that it’s fairly important to most people, and that the only substantial difference point-for-point is there’s a chunk of 4s for Character who are 3s for Plot. Supports are surprisingly unimportant for a lot of people. Then again, maybe it’s something to do with the sample size; they have a reputation, accurately or not, as something that the more casual elements of the fanbase care the most about, and those elements probably weren’t the 122 of you who answered.
People care more about portraits and maps than the harder-to-customise elements. Music was all but a split room. On the whole, it seems for most people like the kind of thing that helps significantly enhance an experience, but probably doesn’t make or break it. There’s appetite for some distinct ‘flavour’ to spice up the FE formula - and to a fair chunk of people, it’s a significant difference-maker - but mostly, people really just need the game to Work Right on a basic level. Which is, to me, entirely unsurprising.
That’s backed up by these results; despite the fairly high priority most of us gave to writing, most of us would play something that wasn’t really trying to tell a story if the gameplay was good enough, while most of us admit we probably couldn’t push through bad gameplay to get to an exceptional story. So if you are purely a war-gamer and you want your campaign’s story to be a formality, this should encourage you. If you want a VN and don’t really care about the skirmishes in between, you may want to reconsider… though, hey, you’ll still have a fair wedge who are interested.
Misc… ?
These weren’t really useful questions. Hey, people will like things if they’re implemented well. Shocker! The only real takeaway is that most of us will play fangames without that conventional campaign structure, which is probably unsurprising given the, I think, four? roguelikes kicking around at the moment.
If you want to start up your Youtube channel on fangames, you’re looking at a starting subscription base of about ninety guys.
This was really obviously missing a ‘computer preferred, will play mobile on the go’ option. Still, this should be encouraging to the LT crowd, and to the ‘every time I find a new bug report it turns out the guy’s using MyBoy’ crowd. Or is that just me? I do suspect this might be one where, again, the sample is deceptive for the greater userbase. We are the rusted-ons.
LT hasn’t quite overtaken romhacking as a preferred medium - though, honestly, I suspect that day will come - but most of us are entirely happy to give LT products a shot. Again, be wary of the sample.
Experiences
I have a great piece of advice for whoever wants to do one of these surveys next: don’t ask these questions.
Top 5 Campaigns
| Campaign |
Votes |
| Vision Quest |
43 |
| Drums of War |
29 |
| The Last Promise |
25 |
| Shackled Power |
14 |
| Cerulean Coast |
10 |
| 4 Kings |
10 |
| DLATMOL |
10 |
| Road to Ruin |
10 |
| Absolution |
9 |
| Storge |
9 |
| Two Milkmen Go Comedy |
9 |
| Sun God’s Wrath |
8 |
| Order of the Crimson Arm |
8 |
| Dream of Five |
7 |
| Lonely Mirror |
7 |
| Call of the Armour |
6 |
| Sacred Echoes |
6 |
| Souls of the Forest |
6 |
| A Vestrian Tale |
5 |
| Deity Device |
5 |
| Blessed Heart |
5 |
| Iron Emblem |
5 |
For the sake of my sanity, anything under 5 has been omitted. For the record, these include several campaigns I love and think are really cool, this is not an elitism thing, this is a ‘people’s means of submitting answers varied wildly and I didn’t want to pick through over a hundred answers’ thing. So it’s possible I’m missing one or two that should rightfully be here (in fact, it was only as I was inserting the table for the next question that I realised SP was missing on this one). There were also a handful of unspecified COTBKs. I think both probably crested the 5 mark, though.
Also, in the interests of honesty, one of the DoW voters added in parentheses that they’d ‘never played it’. Still, 29, love ya, Companions.
Anyway, I don’t think these results surprise anyone. VQ is extremely fondly regarded, TLP is fading away a little. CC’s 10 is incredibly impressive for an incomplete game, as is Absolution’s 9. But if you’ve seen or played either game, it’s easy to see why they’re so loved.
Recommended Campaigns for a Newcomer
| Campaign |
Number |
| VQ |
62 |
| TLP |
30 |
| DoW |
13 |
| DLATMOL |
9 |
| CotA |
8 |
| SP |
8 |
Anything under 8 was cut this time, partly because this is a consensus thing, partly because of my fraying patience. VQ remains the consensus candidate, and in general people prefer recommending longform campaigns that aren’t too divorced from vanilla.
Most people at least intend to poke at the exciting one-shot contests we’ve had lately, which should encourage people to participate in future.
Most of us at least hold aspirations to complete a campaign, even if only a minority of us have got over the line on that. A surprisingly large minority of us have cancelled at least something we’ve started work on. Encouragement to take heart, if you’ve ever had to axe a project; it’s happened to a lot of us.
The masses may crave vanilla, but we want to sink our teeth into original settings and ideas. But it should be encouraging, too, for people hwo want to put a significant spin on vanilla rather than just ‘FE6 as it Should Have Been’ (though there’s also a substantial audience for that, too).
‘Controversial’ features
I decided to include some questions on the kind of things I hear people say are Always bad. Most people have a fairly open mind, though often with the acknowledgement that maps tend to be poorly-handled in the vanilla campaigns. People felt roughly the same about fogs and desert; slightly more people like than loathe, but most of the time, it comes down to execution.
No caveats required here, though; most people just straightforwardly like Defend maps, and for almost all of the rest it’s about execution.
Misc II: seriously I’ve been working on this post for like an hour and a half
Probably not surprising anyone.
Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, most campaign creators had a story they wanted to tell going on. For the gameplay, it mattered for most of us that it was specifically an FE experience. And a lot of us did not just take inspiration from the series’ perceived failings or change in direction, but from one another. That’s nice, isn’t it?
I wanted to specify as a standalone experience really strongly in this. The fact is that, to create DoW and Do5, I didn’t have to build a game engine from scratch or use all-new assets or do all the things that Making A Game entailed for FE8; it would feel a bold claim to say that DoW is ‘a better game’ than FE8 when it’s riding its coattails, operating on the same framework, so that’s part of why I feel it’s fairer to everyone involved to measure the vanilla campaigns against custom campaigns.
And most custom campaigns measure up exceptionally well, we feel, and I agree. We’re doing good work here. Long may it continue.