What QOL (Quality Of Life) features made you say "I wish every game had this"?

Whoever designed the UI in Fire Emblem Engage deserves an award, the design is very human and the UI is very readable. When you see new stuff checking its info is easy. You can even see enemy stats on the map! And you don’t have to block your view of the game with another fullscreen window.

Normally moving to the next enemy/objective/other challenge results in boring “empty turns” where all you do is move each of your guys and end your turn and move each of your guys some more and eventually get to the gameplay, but In Pokemblem, once you’ve defeated all the foes around you, you have infinite movement. To prevent cheese, moving into an enemy’s range ends this infinite movement. And you only have to move the protagonist, not each Pokemon on your team, they are summoned to you when the fighting begins again. I love it, it’s like the developer played Fire Emblem 4 and said “I am going to find a way to solve this game’s biggest design flaw”. It also reminds me of those classic RPGs where your party members walk inside the protagonist and vanish outside of cutscenes and battles. Teleporting all allies to you might be too much for maps with multiple objectives where you’re supposed to split your party but for those maps you could just give all your units infinite movement that ends when entering enemy range.

I’ve been playing Professor Layton and I’d love to be able to draw on the screen in Fire Emblem. Many DS games let you do that. It’d be great. Way better than putting down flags like in Fire Emblem for the PS2. Imagine streamers putting math and arrows on the screen as they plan their next move. The visceral satisfaction of crossing out an enemy you plan to kill this turn.

And in my Fire Emblem game, the turnwheel has infinite uses and I’ve got a use of the turnwheel mapped to right-clicking on the map. But it can only take you back to the start of your turn. So you can’t mash too much and accidentally go back to your foe’s turn forcing you to watch it play out again. To go back further you’ll need to open the menu and click undo, opening the turnwheel properly with all its animations and sound effects, choosing a precise moment in time to revisit.

5 Likes

my favourite QOL is how you can see the stats of characters on the bottom screen in 3DS FE, the 3DS had the best UIs in general for RPGS

8 Likes

Seconding turnwheel as far and away the biggest improvement in QoL I’ve seen in FE. I actually kind of like having a limit to the number of uses (at least in normal mode and higher, for an easy mode it makes sense to me to have infinite) because it forces me to not play too stupidly or tunnel into RNG scumming, but my god the ability to undo some mistakes without a full reset makes life less frustrating.

8 Likes

I like when you click on a character and another has the little speech bubble to let you know you can talk to them. It was in a couple rom hacks and I ended up missing that feature in FE8.

3 Likes

Something all games with recruitable enemies should have is some sort of indicator that the enemy you just beat could have been part of your squad. Some FE games play the unit death music only for enemies that this applies to.

Sadly, not even all FE games adhere to this design, let alone games of other IPs. When there is no indicator, it quickly turns into either “guide dangit” or “I guess I will just HOPE that that enemy was not recruitable”.

2 Likes

That epic vision quest HUD with attack speed and inventories. God that makes it easier as all you need is to hover over an enemy to know their jam.

3 Likes

I experienced peak (Tactical Wizard Breach) on max difficulty with all bonus objectives (without replaying earlier chapters with perks from later) and I have to say, I love consistent segmented health bars with an Armour indicator. His damage indicator doesn’t matter as much if I take him out first. You don’t need to move the cursor over someone to find out someone’s HP and HP percentage. You can see his HP, you can see his Armour, you can see how much HP poison will take from him, you can see who he’s going to attack, you can even see commonly stacked status effects without needing to open another window.

Move the cursor over him and you get a refresher course on that unit’s stats and gimmick. A text window that size might not fit on a GBA screen, or even a 3DS screen, but it’s still peak.

Also, an even better implementation of FE3H’s attack indicators with a consistent turn order indicator. It’s admirably honest.

Finally, peak ambush spawn design. Standing where they should be won’t stop them from spawning or passing through you. They come from predictable doors you can usually close and on the turn they appear, they move without attacking.

speed up button

4 Likes

Thanks. JRPGs have bigger worlds to roam than fire emblem maps, so I decided early on to design around calling your party to you, with the trainer only being added after the romhack was completed. I would enjoy having this feature in other fe games, but it needs to be designed around. Maybe a character that could teleport certain types of allies to them.

Unfortunately with the way that the GBA is setup, this isn’t always feasible. There are 8x8 tiles that you’d run out of if you tried to fill the screen on a certain BG layer without repeating any tiles I believe, and anything currently on that layer would get erased. With sprites, vram is also limited and your markings would get erased when you have a conversation / talk event. You’d need to buffer it all to specific coordinates on the map instead of just coordinates on screen, too. I think game designers need to plan in advance if they’re going to use this feature, especially for GBA.

I made a speedup toggle ingame for pokemblem but your emulator has this so it’s not that necessary to include in hacks imo

1 Like

Honestly I love casual mode for a similar reason. It allows me to not reset. It feels like every fire emblem game is designed with the idea that you can’t just let everyone die.
I hate resetting more than anything.
Even the most iron man friendly game shadow dragon has things such as your first thief recruiting your second thief. And that is the only game that actually has basic Ironman friendly features like “shit replacement units” or “Easy reclassing” or “Catch-ups for when you do poorly”

1 Like

yeah, 3h did it really well, it just cuts out a lot of loading time for people trying to do a deathless run w/o ironmanning it, but it doesn’t let you get totally complacent.