So, what do y’all people think about characters earned through certain conditions? Think like Cath or Douglas from FE6.
As of now, I got 2 planned. The first one(Princess, unique, non-Lord) requires most of her knights to survive to impress her into joining you. The other one(Bishop-M) requires his friends to be alive until he shows up (a Fighter and a Thief).
I think it’s honestly not a bad way to go about it. It incentivizes the player to think about what their actions mean. It also helps with character-gameplay integration or whatever it’s called.
I’ve always found myself annoyed by recruitments that become way too gimmicky. As a player that likes to recruit every character in the game, it can be very annoying.
That being said, there are ways that some Fire Emblem games handle this concept quite well. In Fire Emblem New Mystery Of The Emblem: Heroes Of Light And Shadow, the way in which you recruit Sheena by keeping the Gra recruits alive is a good way to do such a recruitment. Far better anyway than whatever shitty trial you have to go through to recruit Xavier in FE5.
I think that recruitments such as this can help drive a part of a character or a part of the story home. It has to be done properly though, so be sure to playtest it to a point where it becomes less annoying and still challenging. A solution might be, to think of this recruitment as an important side objective that does not get in the way too much of the chapter itself.
All in all, these types of recruitment can be a very nice idea. They should not however become an unnecessary part of the map that alters the strategy of the player too much. Nothing is more frustrating than having to actively avoid Douglas and kill Narcian behind his back imo.
I have tons of units that will join your party, but you can only have so many at a time, and you may only want to train some of them, depending on your cause. If they run away from you then it can be a real test to catch them. But you have to if you really want to be the best, like no one ever was.
If I had to give it one condition, I’d say it’s the 300 gold cost for a pokeball.