and that wasn’t what I was saying either, that references me having a preference for games that dont need you to have a guide for you to play
name Black Dragon, Lonely Mirror, so on and so on - where your gameplay gets muddled because surprise surprise, a boss that had no dialogue nor mention at all at any moment turned out to be a recruitable you had to sleep staff spam on
from Swords and Peace
(other games, such as Bound Destiny make most unit deaths a game over condition in favor of pushing a tight-knit narrative, and Dark Amulet makes certain units [up to 10+ at once, or half your cast early game] a game over condition)
with the reduced amount of deployment slots and underleveled nature of benched units, “competent games with perma death” can end up like Bells of Byelen, whose enemy weapon and enemy threat progression stale up until the end (unpromoted units compose large part of the map for every chapter but the last two-three) due to the assumed cycle of swapping units over (mainly due to both the fatigue and capture mechanics) and never really kicking up in difficulty.
Multiple losses lead to a spiraling fall-out later on the game with less prepared units, so I don’t exactly follow on your comments here.
I don’t think that applies here or is equally comparable - those are the core factors of a game of that genre - and even then you have games that don’t have any of those:
You have platformer games that lack jumping and instead make user of alternative movement options such as portals, gravity switching or different movements, action games that lean towards one-shotting gameplay, or combo-less gameplay, or visual novels that range from having actual backgrounds and imagery to ones that are purely text - it goes way deeper than that.
Fire Emblem isn’t purely a “perma-death” game, it’s a T-RPG first that goes against the main flow of Tactical RPGs (less disposable, personalized troops).
Wasn’t the original creator’s intent with Permadeath in the first FE game to challenge the usual RPG convention of “As the game goes on, you always get stronger”?
Now this is where you are asked to provide a source.
(Permadeath also does not go against the “usual RPG convention” of growing stronger as time comes - it just makes it so mistakes are potentially more harshly punished)
“It’s not a big problem if some of your characters die in Fire Emblem; I want each player to create their own unique story. Don’t get caught up trying to get a “perfect ending.” Have fun!” - Shozou Kaga
what i took from what you were trynna say is that, narratively the grinding is a sort of story choice that makes the hero protag fall from grace, like if they want more exp slaughter these civies etc they give lotsa exps but each one you kill counts a sort of switches that leads to a bad end where after the big bad is defeated your protag replaces them. i think thats a cool idea but it kinda frames it that if you wanna grind you get bad end
I think at this point we are at a point of agree to disagree,
I will say though I would just call this bad design,
It’s why I dropped Road to Ruin.
Despite how memed it is making story important characters retreat, especially with many early ones is preferable.
I think having up to 4-5 game over units given throughout the game is a good hard cap, Telling the player what units cause game over through system message is also a good idea.
My FE6 hack has 4 game over units Mina, Lilina, Guinivere and Dusk.
All four come up in the story often enough and/or have a unique class that implies they are special units.
FE7/8 has a built in retreat endings, “?? Was injured but remained till the end” as such story important characters can use this ending.
Alternatively the engage approach of units dying after their story relevance is done, and retreating before that.
Echoes also did this for story important characters in the final map.
