Hear me out… What if nobody gains EXP or Weapon EXP during battle? You clear a map, and then your whole army gains EXP even if they weren’t even deployed. Nobody gets overlevelled or underlevelled.
You hit level 10 and ask… Do I promote from Myrmidon to Swordmaster to instantly get S-Rank Swords, or Hero for A-Rank Swords and B-Rank Axes, or Master Of Arms for B-Rank Swords, Lances, Axes, and Bows, or keep going until level 15 for the better Myrmidon Skill, or keep going until level 20 for the stats? Promote too soon and you’ll still be punished in the long run by the loss of total levels gained.
Nobody has a Skill Slot wasted by something boring like “gains EXP faster” or “Gains Weapon EXP faster”. Nobody has meaningful choices stripped away because the best move is to always kill with the EXP-boosting weapons and inherit the growth-boosting skill and get kills next to Byleth so you get more EXP.
Nobody micromanages their units to ensure certain guys level up mid-battle to hit stat benchmarks to double foes who would only be a threat if they doubled you. Nobody accidentally or intentionally pours so much EXP into their best unit, that best unit beats the game on autopilot. Nobody equips self-debuffing weapons to kill foes any hit could kill specifically to debuff the user, or gets hit with Enfeeble on purpose, or equips weak weapons on purpose, or unequips damage-boosting skills, or baits foes onto defense-boosting tiles, to intentionally reduce the damage foes take, or lets enemies heal, all to milk foes for more EXP and WEXP. Nobody ever weighs the benefits of anti-slow anti-turtling incentives vs the benefits of turtling slowly and chooses the latter.
“But EXP milking is a big part of raising your units!” Sometimes it’s a really tedious part of raising your units. Pair units for better Class access and better kids, swap classes for better skills, budget your gold with expensive Weapons and Forging in mind, there’s a lot you can do to make a unit stronger, and there’s a lot you can do to make your unit yours, even if you take away mid-fight EXP and WEXP gain.
You will never see a unit like Donnel immediately lose his Lance rank upon reclassing and get dragged down into E-Rank Weapon Hell. You will never have your daily playthroughs harmed by Ike Moments (when the game sends floods of weak enemies after you to die like bugs to Ragnell the bug zapper and give you EXP) or the Fates maps designed to feed you EXP. They can still make maps designed to feed you power whenever they want, they just have to be full of droppable and stealable stat boosts. Raid a castle treasury or enemy town or fort, or recover stolen loot in a bandit camp, it’s fun for all the family.
What do you really lose? The most boring way to break game balance?
Maps where the map objective is to ensure a certain Trainee Unit sees enough combat to level up at least once? Figuring out how to feed all the kills to Bowzu is interesting the first time you do it. Lex Talionis lets you run scripts on combat to check if a foe is fighting, and if a foe is fighting certain units or not. Right now it’s used for pre-battle boss conversations with and without the protagonist, but it could also be used to trigger the bad ending for scenarios where… Someone like Mozu or Saizo gets mad at you for not letting him deal the killing blow against the map’s boss. Or someone good forced onto the enemy side will betray them and join your side unless you prove yourself a villain by killing her men, who are enemies you don’t need to kill. Or a good Green Unit needs to be escorted to the final boss to talk this out, or prove you rescued her so he has no reason to keep serving the villains holding her hostage and he joins your side, but if you kill that boss, that green unit betrays or leaves you. Maybe a character who joined your army because of her would betray or leave you too. You can also turn off EXP and Weapon EXP gain in Lex Talionis and use a script to add EXP to your whole army after every win. I was shocked at how easy it was when I implemented that design choice in my game. I expected it to be a massive ordeal like trying to get my custom triangle attack code to work properly without any bugs. Giving each class fixed weapon ranks took a little longer but not much longer. The hard part was deciding what to name my many promotion options. Probably too many promotion options. Maybe I should combine redundant promotion options again.
Anyway, what FE games intentionally make Weapon Skills part of the Class and EXP part of clearing levels, not progressing through them? I want to play more games like that, tell me their names and I’ll play them next.
And what FE games change your party’s members frequently to ensure your party is always at the intended power level and can’t hoard and smuggle tools into later parts of the game or overlevel a unit to trivialize the entire game?