Hi all, this is a short survey about how you interact with permadeath in Fire Emblem. If you could take five minutes to fill it out that’d be awesome, I’m really interested to see what people think about permadeath as a system and when they do or don’t choose to reset.
(I apologize to the people in the discord who have already seen this)
Happy to have submitted a response. It’s nice to see others do surveys too, lots of info can be gleaned from others.
If I am playing on classic, I am going to reset if I’m playing to play, and it gets exhausting. having a few undos(divine pulse) between those saves my time greatly. If I am playing on casual, I am doing my first run of a game.
If I am playing to test, it is much more likely I am going to keep going after a unit death. And I still want an “all lords” mode in mainline to just spare me a tiny bit of effort.
That’s interesting! Out of curiosity, why do you choose to play on classic and reset instead of playing on casual mode? I ask since on casual you wouldn’t have to face that fatigue from having to replay content.
Also, thanks for taking the time to respond!
I’m a firm believer in the idea that permadeath is a solid foundation of fire emblem identity, and that a fire emblem game that tries too hard to make its units irreplaceable is honestly not very fire emblem.
That being said, I do support the idea of mechanics that lessen the burden on the player for RNG mishaps, like turnwheel.
Recently when I’m recording lps if the game has a massive cast, I tend not to reset after a unit dies.
I think permadeath is a really solid, interesting mechanic that does a lot to make Fire Emblem feel unique from its fellow SRPGs, especially when coupled with the non-generic casts. Definitely hard to imagine an FE without it at least as an option.
That being said, at this point I’m a casual enough FE fan with little enough mental energy that A) I tend to feel really bummed when a unit dies, and B) When I have to reset I feel less “dang it, let’s try that again” and more “god damn it, not right now”, so casual is right up my alley. If I’m gonna ironman I basically need to plan in advance like I’m doing a nuzlocke in a Pokemon game.
I’ve never seen this come up before in regards to permadeath, so maybe I’m just deranged. By and large I’ll allow myself one or two “save points” in a map depending on where in the story we are and/or the difficulty of the map and I’ll reset to that save point as a compromise to playing a whole other hour of game. That said, if the death has narrative impact in the way that we all build up narratives in our head according to how units perform, etc, I’ll allow the death to happen. This means final stands and ends of arcs are fair game for anyone to die.
The tone and themes of the game matter too. Drums of War is about survival and getting each other through impossible situations, and none of the non-boss Company characters die anyway. It doesn’t make sense for them to die. The Phantom King, on the other hand, has whole families dying left and right and more than enough units to replace them. Units dying feel like par for the course.
I’m one of the freaks who thinks permadeath has run its course and is no longer an interesting part of the series and as it stands, the series would be much better both from a narrative and gameplay perspective, if permadeath was a bonus legacy style mode rather than the intended mode.
No shade to anyone who thinks permadeath is essential to FE, that is far too big of a crowd for me to upset lmao
You should post that essay you wrote. I’m really feel like it could add a layer of perspective on the relationship between permadeath and game difficulty. Or even explore the wider implications that permadeath has on the narrative/gameplay of the genre and how its presence(or lack thereof) would affect the identity of the Fire emblem series in comparison to other SRPGs.
Edit: To preempt any accusations of acting in bad faith, I am just genuinely interested in the topic of both Permadeath and Fire emblem difficulty as a whole. I voted in both this and Ghost’s poll and was just curious to see if the essay could be posted. I think it would be good to see another perspective explored in a more detailed fashion. To reiterate, I just really want to see the essay.
I pretty much only reset if my favourite characters die, which is usually 2 or sometimes 3 characters a game that I strictly reset for. I can’t recall the last time I reset because I thought I couldn’t complete the game without a specific unit, if ever. More often than not my resets happen because a game over flagged unit dies lol.
But yeah I just enjoy the dynamics and problem solving that come from dealing with permadeath.
From my perspective, imagine playing a recent game like Shadow Generations and running through a stage like Kingdom Valley.
A) If I just want to get to the end of the stage, then it is easy. I get infinite lives and checkpoints are plentiful, and if I get hit by enemies, I have a decent chance to get a ring back and survive.
B) Now, if I want to play without getting hit, without falling into a pit, and getting the collectibles, then it is more difficult. I have to smoothly navigate through tricky alternate paths, and make little to no mistakes.
Playing on Casual Mode is similar to A). It is near-impossible for me to lose unless I deliberately make as many bad decisions as possible.
Playing Classic Mode deathless is similar to B). I need good planning and execution. For every chapter, a good play is to get as low percentage chance of you losing a unit as possible. Sometimes it’s impossible to get to 0% chance of losing unit, but overall less than 5% is plenty good enough.
Beating a chapter without losing a unit requires more skill and careful planning than beating a chapter in Casual Mode. A deathless run may or may not be as difficult as an ironman run (FE11 is famous for being easier to Ironman than deathless, for example).
I am overall extremely uneasy to post the essay™️ especially publicly. At the time I believed that I would generally be able to write a piece on the nature of fire emblems mechanics and community sensibilities surrounding them while not actively antagonizing the community for its commonly held beliefs.
However after actually putting my thoughts to paper (or Google docs lol) I do not think it would be wise if me to post it in a publicly available space. I don’t wish to make enemies and I fear that the essay would do exactly that.
This obviously isn’t to say it’s some masterpiece, rather it just got a bit out of hand with how I wrote it.
I won’t lie and say that this decision wasn’t further egged on by other interactions I’ve had but that’s besides the point.
I’ll eventually get around to editing the essay to both make it not sound like I wanna throw hands, but honestly it’ll probably be a long time.
There were also just some miscellaneous issues like the survey itself not being worded the best
I never realized this until reading through this post and actually thinking about it, but as somebody who never picks classic/permadeath in an FE game if Casual Mode is an option…it’s not permadeath as a concept that I dread, it’s just the way that FE games go about it that bothers me greatly.
I say this, because both of my favorite games of all time - FE: Awakening and XCOM 2 - have permadeath. I hate it in Awakening, but it’s one of if not THE most appealing part of XCOM for me. Why?
XCOM expects you to lose soldiers, and a lot of them at that, and it doesn’t matter who. Nobody gets plot armor, nobody gets special privileges. Usually the only difference between a dead soldier and a living soldier is luck, especially in the early game. It’s hard to explain, but I find XCOM campaigns write their own stories, with these soldier deaths contributing to it rather than taking away from it.
FE does that too - like when your Lord gets smacked in the face with a 1% crit - but at that point, you either have to restart the chapter or end the run. A lot of units across the games are required to obtain important items, gaiden chapters, or to recruit other characters. If a unit dies, more often than not you’re losing way more than just that unit.
For me, FE treats it like a punishment for playing the game wrong. XCOM treats it like a part of the game itself. I know they’re very different games with very different directions and mechanics, but I figure I’d give my take on how permadeath CAN be enjoyable.
Some Fire Emblem games are designed with Ironman in mind similar to XCOM, such as FE1, FE6, and FE11. In those games 90% of the characters are bland and forgettable, and you get so many of them that you get a constant flow of disposable units to throw at the enemies.
Heck, FE6 is designed in a way that it’s very unreliable to finish a chapter without losing a unit similar to XCOM, and FE11 went so far as giving you gaiden chapters and generic faceless units to use as fodder if enough of your named characters die.
I almost always reset for deaths. The only exceptions to that rule being that I’m at or near endgame, or I’m on a replay and know I have zero interest in using the dead unit in question. Games like FE6 can force me to accept things outside this, by having really huge maps with no checkpoints, but even then, losing more than one unit in a map is usually enough to convince me to ctrl + r. I’ve never fully completed an ironman run, although I have attempted more than a few.
Honestly I’ve really soured on permadeath as a mechanic. Playing srpgs outside of Fire Emblem have really made me reevaluate the mechanic, because most of them either do away with the feature entirely in favor of casual mode, or integrate permadeath into the story more deeply, like XCOM mentioned above. To me at least, it feels like Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem romhacks and fangames largely stick to this mechanic because of tradition, because any dead unit deemed too important to the plot just “retreats” anyway. Nowadays I almost always pick casual mode when the option is available, although muscle memory usually makes me reset on death anyway lol, what can you do.
I’ll always pick casual when it’s available, and I’m at the point where I either edit it in myself or play with save states if it isn’t!
I’ve never been a fan of permadeath when the characters are unique individuals, and while I used to play under some delusion of classic mode being the only “legit” mode I came to the realization that if I reset after every death I’m really only playing casual with extra steps.
I get enough enjoyment out of the other aspects of FE, and I find myself just as satisfied when I can beat a map with litttle to no casualties on casual as I would on classic with much less fuss. I simply don’t have the mental energy and time to play FE classic the way I like as an adult with a job 6_6
Submitted a response to the survey. Hope I helped
I’ll just drop how I play most FE games/romhacks here. On my first playthrough, I’m usually more focused on the story, rather than gameplay. Of course, gameplay is very important also but for me, my focus when playing is more like a 60/40 ratio, with the 40 representing gameplay.
I tend to play with save states and often rn abuse (crits or getting good level ups)
On my second playthrough, I will ALWAYS ironman the game. No save states, no resetting
However, here’s some exceptions.
FE7, FE8, FE9, Justice & Pride and TLP were played on ironman on my first playthrough because their difficulty is fairly manageable for me
I will never attempt to play FE4 without save states lol. The characters are too important for me to let them die but yet the chapters are so long that I would never even think of resetting
So I always pick Classic Mode. And after that, I pick one or two options: ironman or deathless.
Most of the time I play deathless, especially when I play an FE campaign for the first time. Trying a map over and over again until I nail a strategy down. This generally helps me learn how the game designer “expects” me to play, especially when I want to accomplish all side objectives.
Ironman runs are runs that I only play occasionally, and only on games that I have an extensive amount of knowledge of. This is the kind of playthrough that I often post on YouTube because it seems more exciting for the audience.
I don’t like to play “pick-and-choose” whether to keep a lost unit because for me it feels like a copout. I only play this style on my test runs to prepare for a “proper” ironman run.
I’ve found it very useful as a campaign designer to ironman my own campaigns. Rather, either I have to stick with any deaths, or I have to remove (or edit) whatever element(s) caused that death. It’s a really good way to get down to brass tacks and sort the wheat bullshit from the chaff bullshit.
I’ll try to roll with most deaths in a custom campaign, if I can manage it, but not necessarily to strictly ironman. I’m managing it in A Vestrian Tale thus far (at around halfway), and made it through all of VQ with the exception of the first chapter in Act 3, where I figured (correctly, in the event) that taking deaths in that chapter would fuck me in the medium-term. I hate full resets and find replaying full chapters extremely tedious. But I also hate the double punishment of losing items on death, and regard ‘items to convoy on death’ as essential QoL.