It’s not bait. I don’t bait people. I don’t know where people these days find the energy to be this angry all the time. I find internet debates tiresome, especially when someone wants to “win for their side” instead of trying to make the conversation go somewhere positive and constructive. It’s why I deleted my Twitter account. Maybe I’m getting old but I just don’t see the point.
I don’t know why, when I suggest changes to the gameplay formula, some users seek to turn my threads into a shouting match they can “win” instead of a respectful intellectual discussion. It feels like they’re trying to find fault in my arguments instead of forming counterarguments to them, even if these counterarguments are inherently flawed under critical observation or entirely irrelevant to the points I make. How much can you really judge one gameplay tweak in isolation from the game it’s in and how the balance of the game interacts with that tweak? Maybe it’s overpowered for archers to have 1-5 range with Vantage+ against melee weapon users, maybe it’s balanced because all Archers are frail low damage units meant to fulfill a gameplay niche besides big damage at 1-2 range. I’ve abandoned threads before when I’ve lost hope in them. I mean, just look at one of these posts. No hate intended to the maker of that post, of course.
How much of this post is really relevant to the topic of this thread? What are you even trying to say?
I don’t know what MMOs you’ve played but I’ve never seen ones where your choices matter in the way your choices matter in something like Fallout New Vegas or Disco Elysium.
Obviously, Fire Emblem is not and will never be like Fallout New Vegas or Disco Elysium. But hey, it’d be cool if a fangame or romhack experimented with letting the player make meaningful choices for the characters beyond the occasional route split and fake choices during railroaded conversations. Do I go to this village for a Cavalier or that village for a Knight? That question strikes me as rather boring, it’s decided by gameplay or personal preference. Do I make this moral choice to make the heroic Cavalier like me enough to join, or that practical choice to make that pragmatic Knight join me? Sounds slightly more interesting. Now the world is, at least to some degree, reacting to my choices. It’s almost as if this is a role playing game where the world role-plays with me and my choices matter to some degree.
Fire Emblem does not have to be a visual novel, no game with meaningful moral choices to make has to be a visual novel. Even if the moral choice is as simplistic and binary and easy to understand as “Do I harvest the child or not do that?”. Or in this case, “Do I use the cursed weapon made of dragon grandma bones and farm EXP in the innocent civilian village and Fog of Lost Souls, or not do that?”. It’s something people mocked back in Bioshock when journalists acted like it was the most intelligent thing in gaming. I don’t know why people would get so agitated over the suggestion. Surely, Byleth would never behave dishonourably and use such inherently evil weaponry crafted by inherently evil means, or command his kids to do so even if it hurts them and risks mutating them like it mutated Miklan, and Edelgard would never stand for it if you benched some of her most loyal friends for the sake of an all-Crested party. These are characters, established characters, with ideals and strong motivations and inviolable principles, and that’s a universal constant throughout absolutely every Fire Emblem game. Why, just look at how many characters in Three Houses refuse to join you on certain routes because they don’t want to murder absolutely all their friends and loved ones, or refuse to fight or damage or kill specific characters because they don’t want to be told by Byleth to be the one to finish off their freinds and loved ones. The very thought of any Fire Emblem game ever allowing you to make choices a character wouldn’t, like Marth making unnecessary sacrifices so he can farm more EXP, or a player celebrating the end of any Fire Emblem game by sending 99% of his army to suicidally attack the boss once a kill is mathematically secured after all the needless death, like some macabre fireworks display in celebration of your capacity to cheat death until there are no more consequences for senselessly indulging in it! Whether Fire Emblem puts you in control of a nameless faceless nobody Avatar character, a Lord, a Princess, some mercenary, or the world’s most secretly important seemingly nameless faceless nobody, it would simply be truly antithetical to the soul of Fire Emblem for the series to ever give players a choice between the easy mean choice and harder moral choice and let the more principled players earn a shred of the endless praise and adoration heaped upon them by the inhabitants of their worlds. Whatever was I thinking?
I probably shouldn’t have used so much sarcasm in that paragraph, it might make what I was and wasn’t joking about unclear. Maybe the sarcasm should be reserved for a separate paragraph dedicated to it? What was I thinking?
Name one Fire Emblem game where your army abandons you if you behave dishonourably. You can sacrifice units for minimal or no gain, send unarmed men to their deaths or send them to die facing impossible odds, bench units with a burning passion to destroy their enemies and avenge their loved ones just to fill your army with your small selection of personal favourites and walking sacrifices, trap an enemy archer and plink him to death for maximum EXP gain, nobody will object, nobody will leave your army in disgust or even betray you on the spot and turn red. I’ve never heard of a Fire Emblem game doing this.
However, does that matter? Fire Emblem is a franchise, a brand, an IP. They could make a racing game spinoff like Sonic Riders except with Fire Emblem characters and broken flying mechanics. They hired a Vtuber designer to draw characters for Engage and left out vital info about various characters that could have been used to tie them to a nation’s visual identity and that nation’s aesthetics and climate-influenced fashion sense. When it comes to fangames and romhacks, literally anything can happen, regardless of good taste or personal taste. Nobody can intentionally make something worse than the worst Fire Emblem romhack to already exist. Might be tough to set events to create consequences for every dishonourable and honourable thing a player can do with their army, but hey, a game like that is something I’d honestly love to experience even if some would decry it as “Restrictive” and “Not allowing them to play the way they want” without “unfairly punishing them”.
Anyone remember the Jagen thread? I suggested the possibility of a story death letting the old man Jagen symbolically pass the torch to the youth and go out on a high note instead of falling off and getting benched, a good old mentor death to motivate the hero, a beloved and timeless trope that literally never gets old, and a clever way to ensure the player doesn’t screw himself by overly relying on the Jagen for too long during maps that were supposed to teach the player tactical concepts beyond “Throw Seth at it”. And some people lost it completely. “You don’t need to do that if you balance him right!” somebody said. This isn’t about “Needing” to do something. Why attack the premise instead of the argument? No, this isn’t even an argument, it’s an idea, why attack it on unstable ground? This isn’t something I’m suggesting out of desperation because I’m somebody who can’t balance a video game. This isn’t about gameplay balance. Could be good for balance but that’s not the end goal. This is an idea one story, any story, could use. The story of my game might use it. Taking away the player’s crutch, their Jagen, their stern reliable old man mentor character, their new favourite father figure, making the player feel weaker for a map or two, perhaps a Defense map where the hero’s moping over it on his hands and knees crying and sobbing over it and how hopeless everything feels, and he needs to be protected while somebody else talks some sense into him until the timer’s over and the map goes from Defense to Kill Every Last One Of Them and the protagonist gets a buff or class upgrade representing his newfound resolve, it should hit the player harder than taking away a few extraneous Gameplay Mechanics for a bit or introducing the freshly-introduced yet renamed but also established but also self-insert Avatar’s actual mother or father nanoseconds before death. Oh no, they took my time crystal, that made undoing RNG’s negative effects on my game more convenient. Oh no, they killed whatsherface, that’s whatshisface’s mom. And she’s dying, and dying, and… still dying. Anyone remember that time Engage’s mom died for so long during her exposition scene, the screen darkened? As if their console thought the player was away from their controller?
That didn’t happen in a vacuum. That happened because for gameplay purposes, the player couldn’t lose a unit they’d invested time and EXP into just because of plot reasons, but for plot purposes, Fire Emblem parents are contractually obligated to usually die. The game was afraid, even this early on, to punish the player for relying on someone who could have been the Jagen. Even if the Avatar unlocks or inherits some special power or weapon that takes them from Weak Lord to OP Lord and New Jagen Except Gains EXP And Gets Stronger, or if the Avatar is soon joined by some new strong old character to replace the old old strong character, it could still hit the player and his emotions while lessening the blow to the player’s feelings of power and invincibility during gameplay. I believe video games can be art. I believe they can be more than power simulators afraid to let the player feel weak or on the back foot for too long. I believe art can be allowed to let the player experience feelings of discomfort, fear, even dread and loss and pain. I know because I’ve played some of the greatest games of all time. I’ve also read some of the greatest manga of all time, it’s why I believe manga can do more than praise the reader self-insert for showing up and being gifted power and importance by the plot.
Anyone here who played Advance Wars: Dark Conflict (aka Days of Ruin) remembers the death of Brenner and the impact the death of Brenner had on Will. He was a strong character. He was a useful video game function. His loss meant something to the story. To the people who felt something when playing it. I believe the game would have been lesser if its creators were afraid of alienating people who would have felt ripped off by the loss of a character they had emotionally invested into. Or invested a potentially tiny amount of Jagen EXP into, taking away a potentially large amount of EXP from other characters, but then again, AWDC doesn’t give its COs EXP so that’s a moot point. Here’s a woot point: Aeristh.
I forget, has anyone brought up Aeristh yet? That character died too, it was great writing. Pizza’s here. Time to wrap this up. Characters you like as characters and like as gameplay functions can die from plot stuff during cutscenes, it’s great, trust me. Play video games where that happened and didn’t suck if you don’t believe me. No hard feelings to anyone but I don’t get why so many threads on this site turn sour.