Character death only optional in new Fire Emblem

[Julius Seeker]

One of the unique features of Fire Emblem has always been, if a character dies - they cannot be ressurected; they actually are dead. For strategy fans, this isn't out of the ordinary; a dead unit is a dead unit. For RPG players, it is a sad moment when a character dies. In the latest Fire Emblem, there is a mode suitable for both types of player. I am guessing KOs will be what happens on the easy setting, and death for the normal and harder settings.

Personally, I liked character death in the other FE games; I put the characters I liked most in safer positions, because I wanted them to live very much. When someone dies, it's a loss, and it is meaningful (unlike FF or DQ where it has no meaning) and made me far more considerate of my actions. It's also not really devastating from a gameplay POV to lose a character as usually there is a better character to replace them available. If you REALLY wanted to, you could reset to the beginning of the stage and try again; but I personally found doing this spoiled the game, removing a key element to the intensity; and made it feel chorelike.

Another new feature that looks interesting is a character creator. You can create a character in the prologue who will join your army at some point in the story. This could be a fun feature depending on how it is implemented.

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[Don]

Permanent death is just stupid in a game like Fire Emblem. You either just load your game or you play really safe, especially since enemies can critical hit on you. It really doesn't add much except maybe making some of the challenge ratings harder (no deaths and balanced leveling are almost mutually exclusive in a permadeath system).

[Julius Seeker]

I understand that most gamers don't like games where you lose units. They will want things to be easier on them; and the traditional Fire Emblem might be a little too intense. This new one will give the option for those types of gamers at least.

Personally: I prefer the permanent death in strategy games like this. Mostly because without it, there's a missing element of danger; just push forward and win without having to worry about losses; since no one dies permanently. It's similar to having all your units ressurect in your capital in Cvilization after a battle; makes things less interesting for some players, less oppressive for others.

It's not like FFT where a loss of a character is a devastating setback; you get only a handful of units on par with level; otherwise it is back to training from scratch - or getting bad monster units. In Fire Emblem you get new units very frequently; always on appropriate levels.

On Reloading - while it is an option in turn-based strategy games. It transforms the experience from a game into a chore. There's no risk left, no more need for intelligent play; just attack at first opportunity, if it fails, reset and try something else until it works. No need to even think or plan. Whereas playing the game as intended will be a different (and in my opinion, a vastly superior) experience.

[Don]

Leveling up and losing the said units permanently just doesn't work because even in a game like Fantasy General where you have 64 generic units you still can't expect to come anywhere close to beating the game if you lose more than a couple of your 5 star Trial Runners/Phoenix Knights/Black Dragons toward the end. If the computer killed off enough of them you might as well restart the entire game over because there will be some enemy units you basically can't kill without them (at least not in enough time to meet the time limit requirements). At a fundamental level you cannot make a game and call it a 'strategy' game and expect people to get through it without losing any units, so if the option even exists (and it does in FE) then it's no longer a strategy game anyway.

[SineSwiper]

Nobody likes Wizardry now.

[Julius Seeker]

Leveling up and losing the said units permanently just doesn't work because even in a game like Fantasy General where you have 64 generic units you still can't expect to come anywhere close to beating the game if you lose more than a couple of your 5 star Trial Runners/Phoenix Knights/Black Dragons toward the end. If the computer killed off enough of them you might as well restart the entire game over because there will be some enemy units you basically can't kill without them (at least not in enough time to meet the time limit requirements). At a fundamental level you cannot make a game and call it a 'strategy' game and expect people to get through it without losing any units, so if the option even exists (and it does in FE) then it's no longer a strategy game anyway.

Well; usually in Fire Emblem games you can finish them unless you REALLY screwed up: ie. Not leveling up the main character; who will be the most powerful unit at the game's end.

It will be a more difficult task to win if you have most of your army dead in the last stage (having like 5-6 of ~70? characters left). That just means that you probably aren't good at the game, and played badly all the way through.

I haven't played Fantasy General: only Fire Emblem, Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Call To Power, Master of Orion, Advance Wars, and Colonization (that I can think of offhand). I know I finished Fire Emblem Wii with somewhere around 20-25 deaths in my army; and that is supposed to be the hardest version (personally I found my first run through Fire Emblem Advance more difficult).

But I agree; without deaths, it's no longer a true strategy game; at least on the easy mode (which I won't bother playing).

[Don]

The problem is that if you got a game where progress is kept track of (clearly a must in a RPG game) then the game has to assume you have the top of the line characters the whole time. Unless you made the game really easy or dynamically scale down for failure, or have unlimited capacity to rebuild your army, at some point you'll run into a fight that is no longer possible to win with a second string army.

But if you allow people to rebuild their army back up, then what's the point of having perma death? It just means if your Spearman died you recruit a new one and go back to some area to level up your new Spearman hires.

[Flip]

But if you allow people to rebuild their army back up, then what's the point of having perma death? It just means if your Spearman died you recruit a new one and go back to some area to level up your new Spearman hires.

Well the cost/penalty to that is then the amount of money you need to hire a new one and the time it takes to train that guy back up to the level of the dead one. I think thats fitting punishment. While it may ultimately be pointless in the outcome of the game, it would suck to have someone die if it set me back a few hours.

[Don]

But if you allow people to rebuild their army back up, then what's the point of having perma death? It just means if your Spearman died you recruit a new one and go back to some area to level up your new Spearman hires.

Well the cost/penalty to that is then the amount of money you need to hire a new one and the time it takes to train that guy back up to the level of the dead one. I think thats fitting punishment. While it may ultimately be pointless in the outcome of the game, it would suck to have someone die if it set me back a few hours.

And I don't think the game is any better for adding something like that. It'd be about as useful as if an enemy in RPG can delevel you permanently.

[SineSwiper]

I think if I played an RPG like that, I would be really annoyed about any sort of death and would be saving often just to reload. It's sorta like when I played Dead Rising, and getting that notice that somebody died seemed to indicate to me that I failed. I got so pissed off after not saving people in time that I wrote off the game for almost a year.

I guess I'm a perfectionist when I play my games, but it ultimately falls apart in the end. (After hours and hours of playing FF13, I still didn't finish all of my weapons, get to the last extra mission, etc.)

[Don]

Many games are clearly setup that anything that deviates from perfection is considered a failure. For example take FF7 when you've to get the 4 huge materias or whatever you can technically fail on all 4 but most people probably just loaded until they got all 4. And I don't think you miss anything important or permanent for missing them (just miss some master materias which is hardly needed to complete the game).

Megaelixirs are called Last Elixirs in the Japanese version of FF because you'll never use them except for the last battle. As long as you allow people the ability to save and load you can't expect people to settle for anything less than perfection.