I wasn’t sure if this would fit under the unbrella of a Projects/Concepts post since I lack the personal skill to put these ideas into an actual project, so instead I just wondered what discussion could arise from the topic.
I stopped playing Heroes about 3 years ago due to the immense power (and textbox) creep that it continues to see even today. But in general I really do like the fun of playing a shrunk down version of fire emblem, with pretty customizeable characters and even the gacha aspects can be fun in some ways if we remove the context of real world money or the immense grind it takes to free-to-play against PvP whales. With these things in mind I keep wondering how easy / difficult it could be to create something similar for GBA.
Ideas being:
6x8 maps and same movement as Heroes (maybe with the change of allowing Cavs to move onto forest using up their whole movement insted of not at all)
A medium-large cast of FE characters of differing “rarities” (Higher or lower stats) with only 1 unique weapon and 3 skills, personalized to each character, Takumi with Fujin Yumi would give him Acrobat and one skill could be point blank, or Roy with the Binding Blade could counterattack two range attacks and have fierce stance, etc. etc.
A way to get random characters from the overall pool as a limited gacha element. Maybe at the end of each battle the choice has to be made for either a skill scroll for use on one of you existing members, or a summoning ticket, with a way to “Pull” for a random character to add to the player roster.
Instead of having any leveling, promotions, growths, or changes in the characters weaponry, the only changes made between chapters would be the newly available characters or skills at your disposal, while the enemies would begin to move away from generic enemies, to generics with more skills / better weapons / better rarity, then to other existing FE characters of higher and higher rarity as it moves along, as a way of difficulty progression without actual leveling / grinding.
I think it’s really a shame how the unique gameplay of Heroes, and the fun that can be had with gacha mechanics on characters and skills are only ever used n the context of something like FEH itself. While I was a fan for years before FEH, I know more than a few people who started the franchise with FEH due to its relative popularity, and who would later quit for various reasons like power-creep or money, despite liking how the game itself plays.
Does this seem like a reasonable or interesting thing to make?
Do you have any thing you do or don’t like about the ideas listed above?
Is there interest in this kind of thing or am I simply going crazy pushing through college courses?
I’d love to hear any kinds of ideas or conversations about this, since it’s been on my mind ever since I managed to pull myself away from FEH itself.
Ooh, I can fully vouch for Hetja’s quest, It’s a personal favorite of mine actually! I was thinking of giving it a shoutout in the original post for some of those similar mechanics. So I do agree, but in a sense I think there are enough major differences from the actual gameplay side of things to differentiate.
For example in Hetja’s, the movement types, multiple weapons chioces, promotions and outside factors like rouge-lite base building for stronger runs, make how it actually plays much different in battles, and there is a lot more ways to plan on which characters you actually get, by which paths you take in the actual rogue-like map segments.
I think to elaborate further, the small - snacky nature of something like Heroes, with the tiny maps and low-movement could be done in something small, maybe ten chapters kinda like the levels in the training tower in FEH for levels of difficulty. Say we start by entering a seed for the run, which decides the one maybe two characters you start with in chapter 1 with their prf weapon and base skillset, against something like 2-3 3-star “generics” with steel weapons, after beating them, the player could choose between a skill scrol to further diversify the skills of a units, or gaining a random new character of random rarity from the pool of characters, making the choice each chapter until they have 4 characters total to finish the rest of the run with. By the end, the whole enemy team would be made up of 4 to 5 of the 5* characters with their full kit to pose the greater chalenge necessary.
To bring it back to Hetja briefly, that hack is much more drawn out, it’s beautifully methodical with how much you can control, because it needs to be, as a rogue-lite. Whereas I think here, the thing people enjoy about Heroes (besides just being a gacha) is the very contained puzzle feel it can sometimes have with its small size and limitations.
I can’t help but think of the comically small Seoul-apartment-sized maps of FE12’s prologue. I don’t think they’re held it very high regard because not a lot of thought or effort was put into them, but they’re cute and they do have some potential. If you scale everything down, map design principles can remain effectively the same. A 6-move unit starting at the bottom left corner of a 24x24 map requires 8 turns to reach the top right corner; a 3-move unit starting at the bottom left corner of a 12x12 map will also take 8 turns to reach the top right corner. I may have done the math wrong on that, but the point stands. The reason a balance must be struck is that there is more to it all than just size proportions. No matter how small the map is, moving just one space per turn is always going to feel clunky, and if it’s too small you are severely limited in how much stuff you can put on it (enemies, map objectives, different terrain types), so ultimately the most important thing is having the wisdom of what makes Fire Emblem maps click so that they can be distilled to their elements to be workable on a small map. Maps that are very rich in side objectives may not be possible at a certain size because some things simply cannot be condensed any further as nothing can occupy less than one tile. It may limit maps to feeling very similar to each other, but I’m not the best map designer so maybe someone else has a solution to that.
I do see some of what you’re saying. it is also important to note that movement in heroes is only 1-mov for armors, infantry / fliers get 2, and Cavs have 3, which on the drastically smaller, 48-tile maps of heroes it actually ends up being really similar ratio of turns as any other game that you had mentioned above. I think the problem people have with the smaller beginning maps in FE 12 is actually more an issue of the characters movement, in that case having maps only a few dimensions bigger than heroes maps which doesn’t work out with characters that can move the full 5-7 spaces, leading to everything just being a quick cluster then ending right away, where Heroes can pace itself due to the correct tile-to-movement scaling.
I can absolutely agree on the issue of map objectives being much more limited by this size, but generally, I think having the simple task of taking out a specified number of enemies or reinforcements works better on something intentionally bite-sized. People put a lot of weight on map design and creative objectives in this series (which is, of course for a good reason), but I don’t personally believe those are as important in the case of something like this. If a 128 tile map with thirty enemies is poorly designed it can cause immense frustration over the span of multiple half-hour long attempts to figure it out. With 48 tiles and 4 enemies plus maybe a few reinforcements, a poor map design can really only be a minor inconvenience as it will still be out of your life within a few minute-long attempts if you mess up.
And as for objectives, I don’t think the uniqueness is truly an issue here either. Heroes works for some people because it’s like a mini puzzle, not a grand strategy like mainline games, in some ways like playing Wordle or Connections, the objective can always stay relatively the same because it’s fun and doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s the scenario, the letters, or in our case enemy units / placements / skills / types / reinforcements that can keep us on our toes between these much faster maps.
That’s a good point about it being like a puzzle. I only played Heroes for a very short while several years ago, but now that you mention it, I recall having a lot of fun with grand hero battles because of how airtight strategies could be even with few resources. Maybe the lack of randomness and chance is essential when you scale it down to bite size.
And I don’t think I communicated this clearly, but the reason I brought up FE12’s terrible prologue maps was precisely because I think the issues are that a) they didn’t scale down player movement alongside the map size and b) the maps were very bare with no meaningful objectives. Both of these issues could be obviated by simply designing maps with care, so they aren’t really relevant, the discussion just made me think of them.
Yeah thats something I think we both skipped over originally, which was the lack of probabilty in terms of Hit / Avo / Crit / Chance based skills not existing, and I agree with you entirely on that front. Heroes is extremely dependent on consistency, in that if you run one map more than once in the same way, every single action will be exactly the same, so you can do a bunch of quick runs to build a profile on exactly the pattern of turns and actions it takes, leaning more into the puzzle side than in normal FE where you have to contend with low% crits or the ever-dreaded miss on a 98%