Weapon Design is a Black Hole (In Vanilla FE)

I want to start off by talking about one of my favorite weapon types in FE history, FE7/8 dark magic.

Looking at the weapon list, the first thing that jumps out is just how bare-bones it is. In terms of “normal tomes”, you have Flux at D, and Fenrir at A, though the latter is a spell meant to be used by wimpy spellcasters that is the second heaviest weapon in either game, tying the Devil Axe and Armads, and only losing to bolting. So really, even once you get to rank A, flux will still be your bread and butter. Aside from that, you have nosferatu, again, terribly heavy, and quite inaccurate to boot, but the upside of lifesteal is very unique (outside of the runeblade, which is much rarer and comes much later) and gives dark mages a niche tanking role they otherwise wouldn’t have. The other options dark mages have are luna and eclipse, and both have effects that are wholly in flavor for dark magic and are not found on any other weapons. What this creates is a strange playstyle where dark mages have a single normal spell, but they have these other weird tools that they can consider to solve very specific problems. Depending on the map, a playable druid might deploy with flux-flux-mend-physic-vulnerary, or flux-nos-physic-fenrir-luna, or flux-luna-eclipse-mend-elixir, and all of these inventories could have merit. Compared to other classes, FE7/8 dark mages, though they have very few options, play differently because their class lacks a strong weapon progression (iron/steel/silver equivalents)

Now, for something that is not going to seem related. Imagine you are using an archer at C rank bows in FE6. What is the best possible inventory (not repeating any weapons) that they could have? The answer is simple, killer bow, steel bow, iron bow, longbow, shortbow. This is not hard to figure out, archers only have 5 bows obtainable and usable at C rank. This is also an archer’s worst possible inventory of weapons. Now, the thing I want to point out is what happens when you do this same experiment for most post-FE5 games in the series.


In general, no matter what game it is, you see the same names pop up time and time again. And I’ll spare you from doing this for every weapon type, but here are the weapons that come up in almost every game

  1. Bronze/Iron/Steel/Silver/Killer/Brave
  2. Iron Ranged (Javelin)/Steel Ranged (Short Spear)/Silver Ranged (Spear)
  3. Effective Weapons (Armorslayer, Wyrmslayer, Halberd, etc.)
  4. Legendary/S Rank Weapons

The implications of such a weapon system are quite simple. Iron and steel weapons are the backbone of your army, you use them for most fights, silvers, killers, and braves are your lifelines against stronger enemies and formations, ranged weapons are there for enemy archers, mages, and other ranged weapon users, and the effective weapons are context specific.

The benefit of such a system is clear, it’s simple. People learn to freely use cheap weapons and hoard expensive ones, good inventories are obvious, and it makes it easy to transfer knowledge from game to game. The main downside of this system, and what all this preamble has led up to, is that this system is boring (mainly due to a lack of options), kills weapon diversity both in-type and across type, and it makes games that use it all play the same.

Let me illustrate all three of these with a counterexample. Say you are playing Server 72, and you are trying to outfit your Axe Fighter with a good inventory of B or lower Axes. What is the best inventory you can give her? If you asked me this question, I would have to ask you about 10 more questions to answer you: What floor (map) is this for? What is her stat build? Is her accessory slot set to something specific or can I change it? Can I forge her a custom weapon, or is that going to someone else? How many uses of weapons do I need, and does she have her personal skill or soulsteal?

All of these questions are absolutely crucial for a few reasons. First, there are a lot of axes in Server 72. I believe each rank from D to A has around 5-6 weapons, plus an S rank weapon. Secondly, most of these axes have very cool, very strong effects. From the home run bat that increases your crit damage to 5x, to the blast axe that spends your mana instead of durability, to the power axe that deals half damage on miss, there are a lot of useful options that reward you for learning how to use them, and what to use them against, and it protects against boredom because your inventory is constantly changing to take advantage of enemy compositions, map objectives, or your other units.

Moving on, I said earlier that weapon diversity across types is hurt by FE’s reliance on repeated weapon archetypes. Simply put, whether Oswin uses lances, or is changed to use swords, or bows, or axes, will not matter at all for how his inventory is set up, or how he is used broadly (sure, changing his weapon type might shift his matchup spread between earlygame axe users and midgame lance users slightly, but he’ll still largely be the same unit). Similarly, in rebalances with mono-weapon cavs, for example, it’s not uncommon for cavs, armors, pegasus knights, and foot units that all have the same mono-weapon to essentially run the same inventory, and it’s hard for bow and axe users, for example, to stand out from each other in terms of utility, when depending on the game they might only have 1-3 unique weapons that other weapon types don’t have a equivalent of. Notably, these 1-3 weapons are usually the ones that stand out to people, whether fondly or not.

In Server 72, if you asked me what would change about how the game is played if your starting dark mage used light magic instead, I would legitimately be able to write pages, and this is because weapon types are wholly different from each other in a way that makes it so that you use fast lance users differently then you would use fast axe users or slow lance users.

The cool thing about how Server 72 handles it’s unique weapons is that the game stops being about a strict adherence to weapon hierarchy, and that leads to much more player expression. Notably, all the weapons I derided for being boring still exist in Server 72. The difference in context, however, makes it so that if you ever use a silver sword, it’s because you’ve decided that you need it, not because it’s the default weapon for your A rank sword unit, but because it serves a niche, same as any other weapon.

Many projects try to have these cool and unique weapon ideas, but they consistently end up being an afterthought because having a weapon system that is majority staple weapons causes people to use the added weapons sparingly, with the standard, easily usable and replaceable weapons still being the mainstays (this might also be due to the standard weapon-hoarding tendencies, but that is sorta outside of the scope of this essay).

Now, I understand this is a bit of a cherry picked example, not every hack or game dev is going to create a full set of new weapons for their project. Let’s look at something more standard, An Unexpected Caller. One of the most interesting things about Caller’s weapon system, to me at least, is that a lot of classes have special weapons. Armors have the Duren spear, a special javelin with a defense boosting effect, which allows them to take a few extra hits and dish out meaningful chip in return. The Femazuo Dao is a light, decently powerful lance for pegasus knights that grants a bit of res and luck to help with slicing up mages. The dirk is a thief reaver sword that ignores defenses, allowing thieves to act as utility units to kill armors. There are a few others, but the general idea is that these weapons, though there aren’t a ton of them do actually allow you to tell classes apart. They grant useful, unique utility, and though I wish a lot of them had more durability to let you play around with them more, they do partially alleviate the iron/steel/silver problem, along with some other weapons that help fill out the curve of low-rank, non-boring weapons.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone needs to ditch all of these standard weapons tomorrow. What I am saying though is that weapon design is a crucial part of Fire Emblem, it is equally malleable to classes and skills, but at least to me, it feels underutilized. It can be pretty daunting trying to replace a system that works, even a boring one, but decoupling from the standard weapon system, at least from the projects I’ve played that have done it (Shout out Dies Emblem, Embrace of the Fog, Server 72) has always led to a very unique, stylized, different way to think about weaponry and how our units use it).

As a sendoff, I want to go ahead and list, for your consideration, some vanilla-adjacent (aka, possible to create within the GBA engine) non-traditional weapon ideas, some of which I’ve seen already be very cool and unique in other projects, and even occasionally in main series games.

  1. Stat modfying weapons ala Fates. The practice katana (+speed) and the guard naginata (+def/res) are cool, simple ones that I see fairly frequently in a lot of projects (Eligor’s Spear is the one that comes immediately to mind for the latter)
  2. Weapons that mess with avoid and dodge. Odin’s grimoire is a classic weapon that is a cool design, open yourself up to crits to deal more crits. I’ve also seen weapons with built in iron-rune effects for Jagen Prfs or other “safe” weapons. Cool design.
  3. Magic Weapons are fairly common, but are usually reserved for swords. The Morrow’s Golden Country has a set of magic weapons for each weapon type, and it does a great job of differentiating them. Play with types of magic the weapons are impersonating, maybe give your light weapons different flavor and stats than your anima weapons.
  4. Different ranges. 1-2 range has been the FE standard for ages now, and though some games dare to use 3 range as well, usually siege is the only way to get past 3 range. Experiment with longer ranged bows, maybe knives and guns could come back as mid-range zoning options.
  5. Effectiveness. Cav, flier, dragon, and armor effectiveness are all done to death, but GBA FE very easily lets you customize effectiveness for dark mages, lords, bandits, or basically anything.
  6. Early brave and cannot double weapons are a cool way to mix up the traditional flow of combat where speed is supreme.
  7. Locked weapons. These don’t have to be prfs, but having weapons that some people can use and others can’t is a cool way of making the characters that can use them more unique. See Berwick Saga, which has entire weapon types locked to specific units.

Anyway, I think that’s enough rambling for now. Let me know what you think about FE weapon design, and shout out your favorite fangame weapons if you have them. Happy smelting!

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The more unique and varied weapon choices across all weapon types there are, the more fun the player can have in crafting loadouts. Give your weapons appropriate and fun effects, and they’ll be a whole lot more memorable than “Iron/Steel/Silver” variations of things.

Heck, the best way to paraphrase things is “breaking conventions is good”! And I say this for Weapons as well as for Classes and Skills. We don’t need to see “This is a ‘Lord Rapier’ weapon” for the 300th time for an MC’s PRF. We don’t need to see “These are the Christmas Cavs” for the 3000th time. We don’t need “All Cavaliers become Paladins” or “All Myrmidons are fast and become Swordmasters” either. Change things up! Variety is the spice of life!

(And especially do this with Magic, because it’s magic for crying out loud! The fact that every type of magic that isn’t Dark in GBAFE is bland and boring and vanilla is criminal.)

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One thing I wanna add is that oftentimes a weapon’s aesthetic can factor into how much a player is willing to take em for a spin. For example, me personally, my neurons activate at the mere sight or hint of ice magic due to how sparse it shows up in official FEs. Or, to use a different example, I feel like some players would be more open to 1-2 Bows and Swords if they were flavored as Crossbows and Boomerangs rather than, say, Short Bows and thrown swords. Then again, it’s up to preference.

Another thing I wanna note is that while I agree that having everything (even sub-categories) comply by an iron/steel/silver standard can get somewhat boring, I also think there’s some upside to standardizing weapon types to an extent as long as they have definitive niches. For example, lower hitrates across the board (like in FE6) make swords and bows more valuable and axes less overcentralizing; couple that with strong triangle and you still have use cases for all three melee types: Swords are for reliability, lances are balanced and can help pin down speedy sword enemies, axes have their raw power and destroy lance enemies. I feel like triangle is the key here, because outside of raw weapon stats, they help each weapon type have a use case imo, rather than have everything end up too samey due to being too homogenized without much distinction (cough 3h cough).

Regarding the class issue, I personally have a bone to pick with mono-weapon cavs and armors (I like to call em Elemental Monkeys akin to Pansage/Pansear/Panpour in Pokémon), and honestly I’d really like to see more interesting/unique classes as well which is kinda hypocritical of me considering the basically vanilla-esque class selection in my own hack.

Hopefully I’m not rambling too much, bit worried people might not take too kindly to me or what I have to say.

3 Likes

I completely understand “Design Black Hole” mentality. But I think personally, that it’s reliable. It’s good to have more unique weapons. But having TOO many unique weapons can become a headache for players, and lead to choice paralysis.

You also have to take into consideration ROM space. You only have 255 weapon/item slots to work with. And vanilla uses over half of that already. So it’s good to be a little conservative when adding new weapons, so as to not run out of space too soon.

THAT BEING SAID… I think another way of giving more variety to weapons is Skill Weapons. That is to say, weapons with Skills attached to them. Both FE4, FE5, and Awakening did this extensively. So it’s a good place to look for inspiration for weapons like these. Miracle Sword, Thief’s Sword, Superior Edge, Sol… All these are fairly unique.

And ALSO. I agree that these unique weapons in hacks are usually VERY underutilized due to their rareness. We should absolutely make these types more available to the player. But also balance them around such availability, so to not break the game.

ALSO also. I personally like to think of Dark magic as “the weird” magic type. I absolutely love it as well. And other FE games that feature Dark magic besides GBA usually agree with this notion, and give new Dark tomes some VERY unique effects. So here are some examples of new Dark magic in my hack:

Mild spoilers for The Rise of Dragons
  • Miasma: Inflicts Poison. Slightly weaker than Flux. The only magic poison weapon.
  • Ruin: Weaker than both Flux and Miasma. But has 50 crit.
  • Dark Spikes: Effective against Cavalry, AND deals Physical damage based on user’s Magic stat.
  • Calamity: Not a Dark tome, but Anima. It has it’s Reaver effect from Fates, and is Themed around being Anima with a “Dark flavor”.
  • Arcadia: Effective against Dragons.
  • Runebow: A Bow infused with Dark Magic. Deals Magic damage, and has Bolting range (3-10). For now, the animation is Flux. But the idea is that it casts arrows that go into the ground, and come out to seek their target.
  • Ereshkigal: Gives Devil effect to BOTH combatants.
5 Likes

Thanks for the auc shoutout! I think this post is a really good resource. Weapon design is really nuanced and important, and even small changes can go a long way. As some personal advice:

  • Imo, its a good idea to add weapons on an as needed/wanted basis. This way you ensure that the things you’re adding meaningfully contribute to your sandbox
  • don’t fear downsides! any downside on a weapon is an extra weakness the player can exploit when fighting enemies using it.
  • its okay to break free from vanilla restrictions. the strongest nonlegendary weapon in FE7 has 18 mt. (its the devil axe) AUC gives you a bow with 21 Mt in chapter 3. Of course, the whale hunter is a deeply flawed weapon, but that’s a major part of why it works in the first place.
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