So, I’ve been playing a lot of Etrian Odyssey recently (I may be slightly addicted, please help), and I’ve been having a lot of fun basically making OCs entirely through gameplay and the other fun stuff I didn’t expect.
I don’t know how I made the connection, but I noticed that a lot of older FEs without supports actually had a lot of room to make something similar happen. Because characters didn’t have a lot of dialogue outside of their recruitment, you could use the gameplay to give them a story. So I figured, maybe you could take advantage of that; make the lack of dialogue a strength instead of a weakness. There’s a lot of ways to tell a story that don’t involve dialogue, after all.
That said, I understand this kind of thing is probably not what people would expect from FE and many would probably prefer characters that were fully fleshed-out without having to essentially headcanon their own story. However, I think it would be fun to return to FE1’s 2 lines of recruitment dialogue and nothing else, partly because I think having a guy with a weird portrait and no role is kinda funny.
Thoughts?
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Doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all, honestly.
I can imagine a 20-30 chapters game with a big cast (similar in number to FE6, maybe?), with a barebone story and with little to no dialogue, only telling the most crucial elements to know what the plot is about.
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People underestimate how much you can tell with just environmental storytelling. Where things are not told directly but can be interpreted. I don’t know if I’d want to see it for a mainline game, depends on execution. But I think it’d be great for a Rom hack. It’s kinda how I’ve been doing development more recently to some extent. But that’s just because I don’t like writing supports lol
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we’ve gone full circle
now the complaint has become too much story/dialogue lol
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“two lines and a portrait”
so, bosses?
its a hard thing to do, though possible, but the consequences if done wrong could lead to the game feeling heavily lobsided and not really giving the player a reason to exactly care about whats happening
the narrative is what drives some people to continue playing, not gameplay aswell, so it’d also end up being more niche then with a healthy mix of the two
though i think it can certainly work with the right setting i’d only really imagine it being effective in more jokey fangames/hacks obviously
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Like with a lot of writing questions it depends on how well the person writing writes, and the person before is right in that environmental storytelling is a really powerful tool. Buut you have to make those few lines a character gets, well, meaningful. I personally can certainly get into headcanon’ing my own story as I play with my squad, but only if I already get a very clear picture of what exactly those characters are like beforehand.
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I am Weber. I prefer the comfort of my home kitchen and the warmth of fresh bread... but for my country... I will do what I must. Use my skills with tomes and staves as you see fit.
I think FE’s core mechanics (permadeath especially) are naturally designed to foster the type of story creation that you’re describing, so you’ll always get at least some amount of that effect no matter what as long as those traits are still a part of the game.
Despite that, I’m not sure if it’s enough to rely solely on those mechanics to generate a cast’s personal stories, either. Rather, I want to say that style of characterization works most smoothly when the game is designed around it—i:e if the game is willing to commit to setting itself up in a way that eases the player’s process of story generation. As for the mainline games, I want to say that the Kaga games are generally pretty good at this, thanks to the way they lay their story foundation and frame their casts as a part of the established world. Even units like Ralph or Warren or the worse-written subs still feel like they were included in the story for a reason, which makes it easier to write your own stories in your head about them.
In terms of existing hacks, Iron Emblem accomplishes this effect pretty well (minus the characters having unique appearances and what not) albeit for a somewhat different reason. The story and lore being as barebones as it is goes a long way in framing it as more of a generative story sandbox than a traditional story, and I think that the writing being consistently nonexistent is an important part of what makes this work. Were this minimal dialogue style not universal for all the characters in the game, I don’t think it would have been half as effective.
Speaking personally, as someone whose first mainline FE game was FE3, this kind of experience will always hold a special place in my heart. But while I think it’s a vital part of FE’s identity, I’m not confident that it can carry a cast of characters on its own without being handled mindfully, especially in the realm of hacks where I’ve come to expect a generally higher ceiling of narrative refinement than in vanilla.
TL:DR just like anything, I feel it can be made to work as long as the context is right, but when handled carelessly it could easily come off poorly.
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I realize you kinda acknowledge this in your post, but I do think this is a big part of what at least most of Kaga’s Fire Emblem games were going for with their less-important party members! To sorta tie this into another thought I’ve had, I’m pretty sure that’s a factor in why there’s so much randomness in Fire Emblem, too: the outcomes of those random rolls contribute to telling a story.
If a character lands a clutch hit or critical hit, dodges a fatal attack despite the odds… or perhaps meets an unexpected end at the hands of an unassuming foe, those are all big, exciting moments in that character’s story. Maybe they make some big breakthroughs in their training with some great level-ups of key stats, elevating their combat performance beyond what one would expect of them, or perhaps they pick up some new skills as their stats grow in odd directions, changing what you can use them for. From a player’s perspective, these elements can be frustrating just as often as they can be exciting, but I do think they add more to that “emergent narrative” aspect than they get credit for.
Actually, the reactions I’ve seen from players to @Relic’s Iron Emblem validate the appeal of this approach. Your party members in that game don’t even have names or unique portraits; they’re all just generic soldiers with only a number and a division label to identify them. Nevertheless, people have expressed getting attached to their playthroughs’ “versions” of these nameless soldiers, taking pride in their accomplishments, taking note of the distinct roles they ended up playing, and remembering their deaths. It can totally work!
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