Many GBA hacks use skills these days and while many people like them, I know a few friends that despise it so I thought to make a poll to see what the general consensus is (this also may or may not contribute to whether or not I want to make my future projects skill based)
0 voters
My view of gba skills leans somewhat negative because some people seem to just throw them on without much thought or balance because More Features More Better, and some don’t change numbers that may have made sense in Awakening but are pretty absurd with gba-styled stat scores. It’s also obnoxious to check what skills are on gba, as opposed to something with a touchscreen where you can roll your face over it and instantly get a description.
Also, i kind of like the simplicity of vanilla gbafe where you may have a lot of units but can pretty much instantly see exactly what each one of them can do to any other unit, without having to calculate like oh, this is +2 res on tuesdays, and that’s +10 hit if adjacent to a character with red hair, but also this enemy gets +15 evade against people who look mean, now let’s check if there’s anyone with an aura effect around…
But, if skills are thoughtfully introduced and balanced, and if the skills themselves are interesting (there’s a lot of boring filler ones) then they can probably be a good addition to a game.
It’s very well made, people just tend to overuse it.
Depends on which skills you’re talking about.
I think most skills boil down to extra math the player needs to do, which decreases transparency on base calculations, and makes estimating how much damage you give and receive more time consuming. I think cognitive load from skills needs to be light if you want situational buffs to stats.
Movement skills and things like capture and steal+ are really fun to design around.
Proc skills are usually crits with some flair, so they feel largely redundant imo.
Depends on the situation, as Pandan said, Only skills like shove or steal are fun
It the bloating up the skill system thats bad. if you just use a couple skills per a character that are active/unique to the class/character thats not so bad i.e personal skills that only 1 character gets for being x character, Steal skills for thieves and what not, 1-2 class skill. Shove, reposition, and skills of the like are also ok to add flavor. it the shoving of 6 combat skills and just making x player or enemy unit that just making it less fun to use to either use or just fight against. More so when everyone has it. Keep it simple, myself and most people I know usually enjoy the system.
It’s interesting in moderation. Fates/Awakening/3H are far too bloated for my tastes, I much prefer having really basic skills (ex. Single weapon locked classes getting Astra, Pierce, Heroes getting Sol, possibility of Canto+, etc) and then personals ala Thracia. Helps give some units an edge and makes everyone unique without complicating the battle calculations.
I don’t think it’s good to have a game where you win if your skill is activated and lose if your skill is not activated.
That’s just a game of searching for random numbers.
It may would have been nice if the skills had advantages and disadvantages like the weapon triangle.
For example, they could be stronger for range attacks, but weaker when it comes to melee attacks.
Basically, since skills only have advantages, I think people wear a lot of them like accessories.
And since powerful skills are triggered by probabilities, I think it becomes a game of searching for random numbers.
Cmb arts & gaiden magic are cool
Before talking about skills design-wise, I need to mention how much I dislike the technical state of the current FE8U skill system: sure it’s great tech, and what’s even greater is that it is very much a community achievement, but it is also very much a feature-creepy mess that I find very hard to work with and even has gameplay issues with all of the lag going on. I guess that the unfortunate state of buildfiles in general could be to blame for that. 
Anyway, skills are an interesting subject. At their core, skills are just an abstraction over abilities that each individual unit has. Anything that is not an innate property of every unit could be a skill. Whether or not making that abstraction is sound design wise is, I think, arguable. It probably depends.
First, the elephant in the room: proc skills are indeed kinda wack. They’re fun spectacle, but don’t really add much when it comes to designing tactics, and are mostly just fancy crits without much counterplay. Combat arts are probably more reasonable alternatives to them.
That being said, my problem with skills as a whole, as they are implemented in most games in the series as well as in the skill system used by many contemporary hacks, is that they add, in my opinion, a lot of unnecessary complexity. That is they add complexity without adding very many new options for the player.
They add complexity because they make the player need to investigate the skill set of each individual unit to be able to make informed tactical decisions. How much complexity is added of course depends on the complexity of the individual skills, as well as their density (see the popular “skill bloat” argument). For GBA specifically (well, really everything except 3DS which has a bottom screen), it also doesn’t help that you have to actively check a unit’s stat screen to check its skill set (vanilla games mitigate this by only giving skills mostly to units important enough that you’d want to check their stat screen anyway, such as player units or bosses).
They do not add options because each unit’s skill set is mostly fixed. This of course is not entirely true as especially vanilla games give you ways of altering skill sets for player units at least, but I do have issues with most of these methods.
I also really value simple, elegant design and I think skills can, often times, clash with that. Even if you’re only using stuff like Steal/Canto/Shove, why do you need to hide these abilities behind the skills abstraction at all? Why couldn’t these abilities just be innate attributes of thieves/mounted/unmounted units? You like Vantage? Why not make that a weapon effect instead. Charm? Is +2 damage/+10 hit or whatever interesting enough to warrant the added need to check for it?
I guess there probably is value in considering skills even when designing a game with simple mechanics. But I do think that it is probably better to avoid using them unless you really believe you need them in your design.
An interesting alternative to skills I kind of like in theory is something that 3H experimented with a little: accessory items. Instead of have a skill have a certain effect you could tie that effect to an accessory item which units can equip. Unlike skills, accessories can be traded freely between units and allows for interesting decisions to be made by the player (as with any item). Of course there’s no really accessible accessory framework currently available for GBAFE but that’s only a problem when you ain’t a wizard 
Hopefully that wasn’t too bad. Words are hard.
I like Personal Skills cause they can give depth to a character, and make Archer A different from Archer B aside from growth rates. Also same for bosses, gives them a harder strategy to go against, or also provides depth to a chracter.
Like Archer A, has high HP/Str/Def and is a brash arrogant character. Give them provoke or Close Counter
Archer B has high Skl/Spd/Res and is a quiet reserved person? give them shade or lily poise etc etc.
My issue with skillsystems is when people don’t change it and allows 4-6 skills per character. It’s alot of info to read for every character and there’s no easy way to see it like the 3DS games with touchscreen.
tbh Skills like Shove and Reposition while nice, I’m not used to at all in GBA games so I personally never use them (cause I forget too).
You can have fun with them. I made a boss that had skills that made him take no damage from distance and half in melee and a revive skill, making him very hard to kill, but created a special weapon that’s effective against him. This way you need to solve a puzzle in order to defeat him.
So yeah, you can do fun stuff like that, but the issue is skill creep. Keep the skills to minimum so that when you have an important character or a boss you can make him/her stand out.
Overall, I don’t like modern skills in Fire Emblem. I dislike having to keep track of enemy skills and rarely take the skills of my own units into account (except the minus damage to adjacent units skill).
I can like class skills that are permanently attached to a class, granted upon promotion, passively in the background that are just class-gimmicks to make the class a bit more unique. But personal/unlockable skills? Nah. Fire Emblem doesn’t need that.
personally i’m a fan of using skills as a means of showing innate class characteristics to the player without having to stumble upon them or read the class description does anyone actually read class descriptions, though when working within a setup that’s exactly as you would expect from experience with fire emblem it’s probably redundant since whose first fire emblem game is a romhack anyhow
the skill system itself could definitely do with some changes to how it installs skill checks to prevent some of the lag it all causes, re: being slow i have a distinct memory of like 2 years ago suggesting undefining IDs of unused skills and not installing any piece of them instead of just defining them as 255 and being discouraged from following through with it :v
the amount of stuff it comes with is probably excessive but also this is why it comes with most of it turned off by default (which unlike skills actually doesnt install the thing at all)
at some point the defaults should be changed to turn off absolutely everything unnecessary instead of keeping on the stuff that used to just Be There for grandfathering reasons
at some other point we should really bookend the skill system, do a formal release, and only update it with bugfixes from then on
still find it more fun to work with than not so even just in a minimalistic sense i still prefer using it
I prefer to use “standard” skills (Canto, Steal etc.) for standard class (cavaliers, thieves) and passive personal skills to separate same-class characters.
Well skill emblem… is a complex topic.
If you want to introduce a lot of skills, that’s fine but say if you want add a faire to a boss which is essentially +x strength on both player and enemy phase, you might want to consider adding +x strength instead which does the same thing. The same thing goes for any other stat, the exception goes for skill because potentially extra crit, but you can add extra leadership stars or use a patch that boosts hitrates or even boost weapon hitrates themselves.
Generally skills with calculations probably need not be calculated since the battle forecast pretty much shows all the information you need. These include blows, stances, any statboosting skill really.
I’d recommend avoiding proc based skill, specifically ones like astra or impale but that’s upto you.
Now there are certain skills like vantage, desperation and wrath which the player might have to check the menu or if you have an mmb the mmb because they drastically change how a unit will function, these skills you’ll probably want to use sparingly.
For movement skills, there’s a seperate movement patch which covers everything in the base skill system except lunge.
As for branched promotions and learning skills you can make a readme or a guide, which a hacker is probably going to make.
As for skill systems making things complex yes it does make things complex but that’s upto how the developer designs the game.
Because some of the hardest and complex hacks like SoTF do not use the skill system and still can be tiring because of how the enemies are placed, what they have in an inventory and the gameplay mechanics are designed.
That’s my rant on the skill system.
Skillsystem is great.
There are some issues, most have been mentioned, like skillbloat.
But the main problem is really just that people aren’t making their own skills, skillsystem is a good base, but over half the skills are boring and mindless.
But what all those skills do is show you how you can make your own skills (which admittedly is daunting and I’ve been struggling with it quite a bit myself and still do).
There’s so many and different kinds of skills so even if you come up with a completely new an innovative skill, you can most likely just mix and match different parts from a few existing skills and you’ll pretty much have created a new skill.
Again, there’s a lot of and passive stat boosts and % chance proc skills that don’t really add anything to the game, but instead of complaining about it just make your own skills.
Also tbh people are also just not giving skillsystem enough credit. There’s seriously a few hundred skills and people can’t find one unique-ish skill per character, on a cast of 20 or so?
What do you mean “hide”? If anything skills like Canto are hidden in vanilla, and by turning it into a skill with an icon it becomes visible.
Sure, the player will most likely quickly figure out that all their mounted units’ movement work a bit differently than their infantry units, but theoretically if a player didn’t have preexisting knowledge and never traded or rescued they might forever not know that Canto exists.
I think this part goes counter to the rest of your argument and is probably just something you overlooked since every fire emblem player has a preexisting knowledge base to know how these mechanics work from playing the mainline games before any romhack.
My classes have 5 skills at Max, 2 in T1, 1 upon promotion, and then 2 in T2. My playables have 6 due to their personal + the class skills.
Skills have been a big help for me giving classes identity, helping me so that they aren’t just numbers.
So…yeah, guilty?
Personally I really like skills.
I’m fairly bad at explaining myself but I will try.
Skills feel like (if handled correctly) they could be a very good addition to something, though some projects would probably be better off without them. Factoring them into the game in a meaningful way is important and I feel like it could be very easy to miss that mark. From a more personal place as somebody who uses skills a lot, I really enjoy the versatility they could bring to the table in what units you may want to deploy for specific maps or against competing units of a similar class/role.
Good but overused basically.
It’s nice to have some cool abilities to differentiate between classes but many hacks just spam a stupid amount of them.