The Magic Triangle and How to Expand it

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I apologise in advance for how text heavy this is going to be.

As many of us know Magic in fire emblem has always been a somewhat difficult thing to properly assess. Some prefer the standard anima-light-dark triangle, some prefer the tellius dual-triangle, and some prefer the fates range-triangle.

However I, personally, have always felt the gba magic triangle to be lacking when merged with the tellius triangle due to how it really only serves to make anima a mixed bag. Compiled with how some larger hacks then proceed to add new anima tomes to fill out the ranks of the anima triangle while light and dark magic gain nothing due to those same tellius games doing nothing with them in this capacity.

I’ve been constantly mulling over ideas on how to rectify and elaborate on this idea and have a few ideas for other types of Light and Dark magic to, at the very least, try and create a Light and Dark triangle. Some of this is coming from my own personal ramblings while some of this is coming from what I’ve seen done in various hacks.

Light: Since, on average, light magic is wielded by those of a religious order and is usually the “sword” of the magic triangle, for the sub-triangle I had a few ideas that could work.

  1. A set of tomes that, while still somewhat weak, compensate for it with individual class effectiveness. As in a tome set effective against lances, axes, swords, flyers, monsters, mounted, and armor individually so as to give a decent number of different tomes. The “sword” tome

  2. Tomes that provide minor stat benefits to allow their users to fight more effectively ontop of slight crit to act as a sort of “Zelotry” tome due to their personal belief in their cause/god/etc “rallying” their spirit allowing them to fight with a more intense furvor. The “axe” tome.

  3. “Healing” tomes. Tomes that basically have any number of skills on them either heal themselves or their allies between turns while being somewhere in the middle of the power scale. The “lance” tome.

Dark: this one is suprisingly a lot easier to work with for ideas since there’s already a few base ideas floating around.

  1. Draining Tomes: since Nosferatu already “drains” Health why not tomes that inflict lesser stat seals while also being slighty more accurate.

  2. Blood Tomes: Tomes that are basically just like Fury, they give a powerful effect while harming the user to use in battle.

  3. Status Tomes: these ones would have exceptionally high might for most of them to compensate for the fact that 3 of them are unable to double due to how sleep/silence/berserk work on weapons.

I thank whosoever actually takes the time to read this mammoth of a post and wants to contribute to the idea further. I would also love if some of the more capable hack makers out there actually use some of my ramblings as a base for them to build upon.

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The main reason I like the GBA magic system is for the class variety. In the games where Tomes are a single weapon type, there are fewer different magic classes than the GBA era. Since these are also games that emphasized reclassing in order to acquire skills, magic units were left in the awkward position of often having to move into a physical class in order to acquire skills while the magic classes don’t really offer anything that physical units want.

I really don’t like the Fates weapon triangle because it feels unbalanced that, under normal circumstances, anyone who attacks with their magic stat will always be at a disadvantage against lances and knives. It might have worked if Fates had different magic types that were paired with each of the three melee weapon types, but as it is, it’s often unsafe to do magical damage to certain classes without using Calamity Gate (which is a more important weapon in Conquest than it really needs to be) or certain magic weapons (which have their own drawbacks), and the game feels unfairly balanced against magic.

I think the issue with the magic triangle in most games that have it is more that most magic units don’t take much damage from enemy mages anyway, so the player rarely needs to consider it. In FE4, mages generally don’t have much more Res than physical classes so it actually is dangerous to be at a triangle disadvantage with magic.

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Yeah, I can understand how fates was kinda wonky with how it handled things but I think it was more of an idea so that knives didn’t end up being too broken so they did the whole 2-range triangle as a kind of slapdash fix for it.

I suppose my exasperation with the magic triangle as a concept in more recent hacks is it really is either vanilla magic triangle or tellius+ triangle with more anima.

Funny enough it was Deity Device that sorta kickstarted this idea in my head a few years back. Likely reflected in my take on status tomes.

I mean, I would love to actually see some more creative flexing on Light and Dark magic since it can be just as interesting to create new “schools” of magic beyond what tellius did. Which is honestly when a large amount of new tomes were created but whos magic triangle only exists only due to the absence of dark tomes in the first game of the pair.

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