Permanent Death has always been the biggest point of chaotic back and forth in my mind. I always want to have the threat and weight of permadeath present in my mind as it will pull me further into the game and underline what it means to me, but I am all too ready to reload saves. Maybe the inconvenience of resetting the game is the punishment i instinctively know i deserve for not adhering to my own convictions.
This is the huge reason why it's so difficult to convince someone who hasn't "taken the plunge" so to speak to try not reloading saves. It's just instinctual to want to have all your options open, and especially if you don't know what challenges are upcoming in the future. The difficulty permanent death faces is that it needs to convince people that characters are worth protecting, but also not worth wasting time on bringing back. Especially for a first play experience with a game, that balance may be impossible to ascertain if it is even there.
hi from a year later! i'm totally the same and i find that i love thinking about fire emblem as a puzzle game for that reason- i love playing the levels over and over to figure out how to make it through without losing more than one or two guys
@@ChrisTheFields Hey I know this is a year old but I'd like to chime in, the issue comes with a lot of us old veteran traditional RPG players, the future will kill you. I use my elixir and suddenly I need it for a later battle, so you save it without using it. Same terrible mindset with Fire Emblem, this character is scarce, its better to have them and not need them, then the opposite. Simply put I've been burned before with RPGs punishing me for playing like they wanted or using resources. Fire Emblem WANTING me to do one thing ain't gonna change that habit and your video highlights that its up in the air what philosophy they will take next, maybe I'll get replacements, maybe I'm screwed at the end game for letting too many units go to crits!
I think Final Fantasy Advance Tactics’ way of handling permanent death is the best, basically there were these specific areas that had no laws (laws were what’s stopping units from killing each other) so if your battle was in one of these areas you get more serious and stay more focused and when a character dies you kinda accept it, but when the entire game “has no laws” I tend to get kinda bored and not think too much about my moves which forces me to restart the entire chapter.
@@Munto-Z Even in FFTA you can get them back if you act fast enough as there's a 3 turn time limit before they are dead dead. I think Valkirya Chronicles has done it right, a unit gets down and is unable to act, you have a chance to correct your mistake with them by rushing a unit to them and getting medic to save them, if though and enemy unit reaches them first they are done for, then it takes time before the unit is able to redeploy to the battle field. I think FE needs to adopt something like this. Drop Permadeath as the main mode make it so that the unit is outta battle for X battles. Where X is like thier level/2 or something with it being a minium of 1 battle. This would be a great way to A make tatical choices mean something snice you can lose someone strong mid-battle still, but still have some drawback for losing the strong unit, AND it could be a good way to make players use other units in side battles. Of course there would need to be random battles, I think something ala Awakening would work, after every battle the map has a chance to spawn those undead things, you could also use an item to draw them out.
People were reloading to save characters way back in the first game. The thing is characters are not equal. Whether it's power discrepancy or just character design. People want to keep their cool characters. Anything short of making the units generic like in advance wars will make players want to save them.
I agree. I even curse if I loose a soldier as Nova in SC II CO-OP because they have names and her mechaniques make it possible to not loose anyone. That is why in Ghost Recon they made in game 2 the made Scott Mitchell. Because where they thought in first game, they make generic characters where the player made the story, instead people did not care as except the specialist they got replacement anyway.
It also helps that in most games these characters are limited. You won’t be able to get more easily and some serve unique niches that cannot be replaced.
So, my first FE game was Radiant Dawn when I was like…11. Only played it cuz of the cute girl on the cover, knew absolutely nothing about what I was in store for. So, predictably, I SUCK, and I am basically losing units left and right during what feels like every chapter of the game. I have no strategy, I am essentially just bashing my head into a walk until the wall breaks and let’s me progress. By the time I beat it (don’t ask me how, I genuinely get confused trying to think about it), nearly the WHOLE army is dead. I only got the essential “these guys need to live for the plot” characters like Ike and Micaiah…and then there’s Nolan. This random ass dude who carried me from the beginning of the game somehow avoided ALL of my stupidity and stood alone amongst a field of corpses, the only survivor of this absolute nightmare. What a guy, and what a play through that was. Never touched the game since lmao
Reminds me of the time I got once got Path of radiance. At the time, I had only known Fire Emblem through Smash Bros, so when I see Ike on the cover, I think, "Oh, this is Ike's game. Smash Bros told me about it. I bet it will be like the Legend of Zelda." I played through the first few levels thinking, "ok, maybe the actual adventure game will start after I do these chess games" I proceeded to have everyone die and then returned the game. This is one of my biggest gamer regrets, as now that I've grown to like strategy games, I wish gave Path of Radiance an honest try back then.
My first run of Awakening probably would've been just that if I hadn't played on casual. Even so, a lot of resets for Chrom and Robin to the point I had them just hiding behind Sully and Cordelia respectively the entire game, as I couldn't strategize to save my life at the time.
I tried to iron man awakening once, and I got really invested in the little stories that cropped up naturally through the gameplay. Until during a child paralogue I got my entire army (aside from the characters that have to remain alive) killed. I spent the entire rest of the game with nothing but Chrom and Robin, mindlessly having them walk slowly towards the objective while hordes of enemies ran into the meat grinder. It wasn't fun.
@@scarocci7333 I mean I'll remember it, sure, but only the first half. I can't remember a single story beat or gameplay event from after you reach the second continent
@@dragonslibrary9207 that’s also just a big flaw with awakening in general. The experience system means that it’s always most optimal to just pour all of your resources into a single character.
I think permadeath on awakening is fine on normal, on any of the higher difficulties it begins to test my patience. On normal, it makes me actually pay attention and makes unlucky situations force me to reconsider how I should approach the game. Higher difficulty settings make me extremely annoyed with the ambush spawns and makes keeping my units properly leveled through cycling them in and out ineffective.
I feel like the major change is that each character now has narrative weight. Beyond an intro quest, characters now have actual feelings, stories, lives, families, loves. You’re no longer losing Tim, the powerful axeman who saved you on Map 7. You’re losing Gary, the kind, sweet hearted buffoon who slowly but surely began to date your white mage Grella after multiple years fighting together on the battlefield, who journeys with you in hopes that someday he’ll find his missing sister, etc etc. The reason why games like Xcom, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, etc thrive with permadeath is that the narratives you construct are in your head. You may imagine Gary “Rumble Tumble” Johnson has an intricate story and lore, but at the end of the day he is never actually anything but a bundle of numbers. When he gets gunned down, you don’t “lose” any content. That’s it. That’s the real ending of his story. Whereas if Gary the axeman dies, you never actually learn what his story could have been. With the shift from tactics to narrative RPG, Fire Emblem has shifted permadeath from a temporary strategic setback to a giant narrative failure. You lose all but one unit in Xcom, and that hurts but it’s a failure you can recover from. You lose all but one lord in Fire Emblem, that’s hours of interactions and narrative lost. And if you’re only playing the game one time (like most casual fans do) you’re not gonna accept missing that much.
imo the added story should be irrelevant. Yes, it is making more people reset, but the more important point from my perspective is that an ironman in newer games is not as viable of an option as in earlier titles. 3H is very much the most extreme example: every death is a monstrous blow which you have no options to recover from if you're past the timeskip. The problem isn't the narrative, permadeath just doesn't work gameplay-wise anymore due to how modern FE is designed.
It’s definitely both for me. Mechanically in 3 houses you have less characters to recruit, they’re frontloaded, they require more investment to be useful and more completely fill a slot in your line up. Also for things like the children mechanic in awakening and fates your new characters were tied to keeping your old units alive. But additionally what he was saying story wise: the support conversation, paralog chapters, dialogue you may get from them during cutscenes and home base conversations. You’re losing more than just the end credits card for them narratively now. Which is definitely not only a bigger percentage of the story but also a big reason why many new players interact with these characters in the first place.
Very well said. If IS is going to keep classic mode around (which I want them to), then I would like to see a game where the loss of a character is felt in the story. Taking your example, what if Gary dying unlocked a special mourning scene where Grella grieves for the loss her trusted ally and vows to keep moving forward to honor their sacrifice. If its significant enough, she could even gain a new skill to reflect how this big moment has affected her. What if even though Gary is dead, you still unlock his paralogue where you find his missing sister, but now instead of a happy reunion, the ending cutscene is a bitter-sweet of your lord explaining to the girl that her brother is dead and the teary-eyed girl pledging herself to your army to fight for the same cause as her brother. In this scenario, not only are you not losing out on story and game content, but you're actually unlocking a new unit with new supports that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This is what I'd want to see in a future Fire Emblem game, one where the story and characters react to a tragic death, giving you new or alternate content instead of just locking off content. Ideally, I'd love to play a game where everyone except the main character and lord can die certain characters dying can alter the way the story progresses (ex. a character you recruit in chapter X acts as your guide and helps you beat the villain to the plot Mcguffin in chapter X+4, but if they die before that, you don't stop the villain from getting the special Mcguffin, leading to a much harder battle in that chapter)
I genuinely care less about most modern characters in the last 3 new entries than even generics in like the shadow dragon remake. Since awakening they characters have been hard to enjoy.
@@MathMasterism The problem is then what was already said in the video, that the game starts to reward you for losing your soldiers. If you do this, then completionists and optimizers will just start killing off "Gary" for these extra buffs and characters and swap him out for "Chad, the better axe guy".
"Don't get caught up trying to get a perfect ending" is a hard pill to swallow for many gamers. Especially as we get older and have less time to dedicate towards these kinds of things. Speaking for myself, I have a huge backlog and I don't have time to replay stuff anymore so I want my experience with a game to have a good ending. The easiest way to avoid players wanting a perfect ending is to simply not include one. That's actually why I nearly despise Triangle Strategy.
In this case, you interpreted the quote too literally. There are only a few Fire Emblem games that even have additional endings beyond the standard ones. What Kaga was referring to being the "perfect ending" in context of the interview were the players too caught up making sure everyone survives at the end of the game.
Triangle Strategy does have a golden route though! And it's possible to get it on your first playthrough if you don't want to go through the other routes (but I don't think anyone would recommend it tbh)
@@KazuraiKoori I think what they're saying is that they don't like that Triangle Strategy has a perfect ending because they feel compelled to reach it, which effectively means they have to play with a guide in order to avoid replaying the game in full multiple times over.
I do want to admit, I have only played the “modern” FE games. And while I never enjoyed Classic mode for the main games, playing Cindered Shadows on Classic Hard was the most fun FE experience I had. Like, obviously losing characters isn’t really viable on the play though, but figuring out how to complete every stage without losing anyone was surprisingly fun. The divine pulse system feels incorporated pretty well too. It feels like extra life in shoot them ups, where it makes the game less unforgiving, while also makes it exciting when you spend 30 min finically near the end of the map, and you are all out of pulses. Edit: forgiving -> unforgiving
I think a game that does this system well is Wildermyth. Instead of just "character dies" in battle, there are also options for another character to take the killing blow, the "dying" character takes an injury (that affects gameplay), the character goes out with a bang (massive damage to enemy), the character goes out inspiring others (bonus hp/armor for survivors), etc. And further, the characters each have an age, and each section of the story is separated by 8-12 years, so characters that fall in love can have children that show up later in the gameplay. And further, characters can retire from old age, passing down experience to a newer character. I think a game like that is the best way to evolve the "permanent character death" system while still allowing for good stories.
Hell, not only that, but if I remember correctly (haven't played in a long while). The "Legend" system allows you to bring back said charecters (with an increased cost to recruit) to another adventure, so really its "semi-perma" death.
What I think is holding back perma death in modern Fire Emblem is the fact that when a character dies, that death isn't acknowledged in the story past their death quote. In games like XCOM or early Fire Emblem you could get away with very little fanfair after a character death because in those games characters are mostly just stats. You can have a personal attachment to one of your XCOM soldiers because they made a 5% shot and saved a fellow soldier, but they don't have any backstory, personal drama, etc beyond your own head cannon. Fire Emblem: Three Houses has some of the best written and 3-Dimensional characters in the series, but that just makes in it all the more lame when their mention in the story abruptly ends when they die. In most stories a major character death is meant to be a big thing that is felt by the audience, the characters, and potentially the narrative. In Fire Emblem, if Ignaz sees his best friend Raphael die right in front of him, not only does that lock you out of their supports, but Ignaz's character is not at all affected by the loss of his friend. As a final example of how modern Fire Emblem's stories doesn't support perma death, some characters can't even die when their health goes to zero because they need to appear in later cutscenes for story progression, so they just get taken off the roster and are never seen until the story needs them. In a future Fire Emblem game, I would love to a see a kind of "Mourning System" in addition to the tradition Support System. If a unit in your army dies, you unlock a special scene where a character (or group of characters) that had a connection to dead unit mourn the loss of their ally and deal it in different ways. They could even receive special attributes afterward (for example if a character died to a recurring boss, maybe the unit with highest support level with them gets an attack bonus against that boss). This could help make the hole in your roster not hurt as much. I also would like to see a Fire Emblem game experiment with having one story route that branches based on decisions and what characters you've loss. Like what if a character you recruit in the early game is from a foreign land that you visit in the late game. If that character is still alive, then they will be an intermediary that smooths out relations with the people there, but if the character died before getting to this point the local are more hostile to you, leading to an extra battle, or maybe your army runs into the parents of the dead unit and your Lord will have to sadly explain that their child is dead. TL;DR If Fire Emblem is going to continue making units with fleshed out backstories and a lot of story content, then they should make it so losing a unit doesn't just lock you out of content, but instead unlocks new/alternate content. That would give players a reason not to reset the game when a character dies.
The funniest part is that you don't need to make a special mourning scene, there's already a war end recap that tells what happens after, the dead characters only have "dude died lmao" instead of telling exactly what happened to their families and friends after their deaths.
@@XxLoonitickxX you make a good point. In hindsight I should have just said I want character deaths to unlock alternate content, that is to say content that serves the same purpose as the content you would get if a character were alive, but with its own unique context. Like most people don’t say the different routes in 3H are locking off content to players because every route has the same amount of mechanics and different varieties of units, it’s just the context you interact with them that’s different. As an example of what I want to see, imagine if you unlocked a unit’s paralouge regardless of whether they were alive or not. The context of the paralouge and how it ultimately resolves would change but you’d still get to experience the level and claim the rewards. As an example imagine Petra’s paralouge, but this time your going to Brigid to quell unrest as the Petra is dead and there is now a big succession crisis happening. This wouldn’t encourage people to intentionally kill Petra as it’s just a sadder version of her normal paralouge, but it would discourage reloading if Petra did die since you won’t get locked out of going to Brigid.
I think 3 houses characters are mid tbh. I mostly agree with your sentiment but the way routes work in 3 houses shallows the characters for me significantly. And some characters i straight up laugh when i kill on other routes. Were they written better i woudn't be feeling this way. 3 Houses murdered permadeath in a certain ways that are beyond character progression of others and narrative punishment: Unit investment (character on level 20 you saw grow from evel 5 who you spent so long seeing grow just dying to a random crit who otherwise is a powerhouse) for exampe of one, and another being you recruit nearly all characters at the exact same time and place. If you lose a character in a niche you had prepared, you won't be getting any repacement. On my fe7 ironman run for example, my healer priscila died on one of last chapters but i pressed on. Why? Well, the same chapter Legault joined - a mysterious character that i usually pay no mind, became one of my mvps due to his high staff rank and even got A rank support with Lucius that i woudn't have considered otherwise, rewarding me due to limited supports for each character.
The problem with that would be that this means a exponential effort on the game dev with each additional character. It'll mean, by neccessity, a massively reduced rooster, which then again runs into the problem discussed in this video with game difficulty, where your run can become essentially doomed. I dont think thats a viable route for Fire Emblem to take. But a new roguelike spin on the genre where losing is half the point of the game could possibly pull it off. But again, dont expect the 30+ well written characters Fire emblem enjoys.
I played FE3 Book One for the first time recently. I decided to iron man it. The personal experiences and stories that came from it was one of the most fun things I have ever done in a Fire Emblem game. Wendell dying to a 4% crit, Ogma getting Godly level ups, Navarre dying to a 2% crit, Merric cheating death multiple times, Jeorge dying to a 7% crit, Minerva dying due to missing a 96% attack, and Hardin dying to yet another crit (I didn't catch the number). I still really enjoy modern Fire Emblem. In fact, Awakening is probably still my favorite entry in the series. It's just a shame that many games aren't built around iron manning as much as others.
It's amazing how much more I've remembered from small little moments like these. My first time playing Fates-Conquest, I was at the very end of a chapter, and Arthur was about to die. I was getting ready to just reset right there, but Arthur (the unluckiest character in Fates) managed to dodge an 80% hit against him. It was just one incredible moment that lasted for only 3 seconds, but it says volumes I still remember it more than 5 years later.
DND Campaigns have to address a lot of this same design space when dealing with character death. Because each table is run by its own game master, there's a ton of experimentation with various styles of RPG + Tactics Simulation, complete with dealing with consequences of lethal mistakes. Having a downed character in fire emblem type game bleed out for a few turns before really dying, during which time they might be healed and brought into the fight or at least stabilized, would be a great addition to the games
That would be great, but it would need some balancing to make it stick to the perma death part, like the character being unable to fight, be it for a few missions, or forever, so that you don't think because they can be saved, they should be thrown into harsh situations
I think one thing that got overlooked in your discussion of Classic vs. Casual mode is how playing Classic mode in a way where you reset after each fight, because you care about the characters or because you know you'll be punished for losing them, that still adds a degree of difficulty and strategy that is removed if you simply play on casual. On casual you can just throw your units blindly towards the enemy, particularly towards the end of the map, and if one of them dies, oh well. On Classic however, if doing that leads to someone dying, you end up having to replay the entire map over again to prevent that from happening (or just let it happen and not have that character anymore). The real nail in the coffin for this is the Turnwheel mechanics, where even on Classic you can just rewind the turn a few times per map so a handful of dumb mistakes doesn't require a reset. But I think in a Fire Emblem game without the turnwheel, there's still a place for Classic as a means of forcing you to consider your movements and not accidentally put your precious units in danger, where on Casual mode you'd just be able to shrug off a mistake like that, complete the map, and still have your guy back.
This is what I was trying to convey at 21:37 although I guess I didn't do as good of a job expressing that as I thought. Alas, there's only so much time in a video and not enough nuance to go around. But I suppose that's what clarification in the comments is for. Even if permadeath in modern FE doesn't understand why it was included in the first place, players still have to engage with the mechanics and risk to a degree far greater than is required on Casual Mode. I'd still rather have Casual Mode be there than absent. But it should stand to reason that a game that is fun to play with the intended difficulty on Classic Mode will also translate to a fun Casual Mode experience, where that doesn't work the other way around. And I'm not completely against the Turnwheel either. It's simply too versatile and convenient to use in it's current state. I think it still has a place in Classic mode. But in order for that to truly be compatible, it needs to be a strategic consideration rather than the obvious decision.
It is hard to include permanent death when losing any characters means missing story, making the game harder, and losing what you have built up. Shadow dragon definitely seemed to be on to something though with those extra missions for different characters if you lose too many. The true solution to this problem might be for the game to take more divergent paths if characters start dying, like completely new missions and storyline, sometimes more expansive and interesting than saving everyone, maybe some character even change after seeing all of their friends die, maybe they get a boost as they try to be better so they never let their comrades die again. A game like that would make playing with perma death a lot more interesting as you truly will get a unique story. It would make the games a lot more complex though, and a lot harder to develop.
Counterpoint: with turnwheel, enemies can have "stories" through gameplay that are unforgettable due to the devs being able to do more with new mechanics. Anyone who got their whole blue lions team swept by Edelgard's raging storm on Maddening mode in a single, unending chain of carnage that is so unlike anything they've ever seen an enemy do, not in a scripted cutscene, but an actual map, will likely never forget that. I know I won't.
The first time you meet the Black Knight in the Telius series and hear this music only he has. I think many players started with Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn, they'll know what i mean.
Even without the turnwheel you can still have these moments. The dread when playing FE12's Chapter 8 and and watching the combat forecast say "0" as the enemies close in from all sides and you're just flat not supposed to fight them is something I won't forget easily. And besides, if Edelgard did that and actually killed four of your party members and made you reset, you'd probably be really pissed at the time, but you'd appreciate the game having the willingness to actually do that when looking back at it.
@@lefthandedscout9923 haha agreed and I'm really glad they did give edelgard something so powerful as an enemy. My point is the reset is inevitable though right? If by definition you were caught completely unaware by a map or character having something that strong that you couldn't have foreseen, turnwheel just saved you having to redo a whole map for the sake of an (admittedly fun) gotcha moment made by the devs. Also someone else in this reply chain mentioned the black knight in PoR. It got me thinking that it also lets you be a lot more experimental with seeking potential dialogue options knowing that you don't have to run back the whole level. I'd imagine this is how most people make discoveries in older emulated games using save states?
The way I found out the permanent Death in FE was in 6, and it was shocking to say the least. The Red cavalier Lost a battle and then he said something like "Sorry Roy, perhaps I can't continue from now on." and I was, oh he retired. Then the next chapter I was looking for him and then it hit me. "They can Die..." That run was brutal, I didn't recruit a lot of units, lost many of them and obviously I didn't get the true ending. For that reason I always reset a chapter if someone dies, Unless it's near the ending of that chapter and I can't do anything. Also, in Valkyria Chronicles happened something similar. One of my Soldiers got down and I was going to get him but the enemy Reach him first. After the chapter I saw his name in the memorial menu. Geez... Great way to remind my bad strategy... Cool idea and concept of the war, but man it hurts.
In vallyria chronicles at least is easier to save people honestly if defeating them 1 time was enough to kill your units it would be stupid hard. So there normally is not as a big Of a treath as in fe specially When the game lets you Save multiple times in a map
somdething i love about tellius and echoes that i wish was done in more fe games is that if a character dies after the battle you can see the effect it has on the other characters (tho i doubt anyone even knew it was in echoes when the turnwheel exists)
One thing that the series could do to make permadeath more relevant to the broader fanbase is expand on what Path of Radiance did with some of its supports by having the support change based on who has died (example being the Tormod and Sothe support if Muarim dies). Having dialogue change not just in supports, but also in story moments would do wonders for revitalizing a for the most part obsoleted mechanic by reinforcing the personal narrative of the player with long-term story ramifications alongside gameplay ones. Partially relevant tangent: I started playing FE with Sacred Stones back on the GBA, I've always played the series with the idea of each map being a puzzle, and death being the punishment for making a mistake on said puzzle, it's a mindset that enforces careful planning and disapproves kamikaze strats, that's why I still play on classic, since there's no easy way out of the puzzle. That same mentality has also resulted in a real habit of cranking up the difficulty (starting each new game on hard for a first playthrough), which has only highlighted how much worse difficulty balancing has gotten across the series since Path of Radiance's JP only maniac difficulty (which got heavily neutered and rebranded to "difficult" difficulty), with most games going for poorly thought out gimmicks and/or clearly not playtested enemy scaling (Awakening's Lunatic+ and 3 Houses' maddenening being the most egregious offenders) for their "very hard" and beyond options. Shadow Dragon and New Mystery's bevy of gradually increasing difficulty options, and Conquest's shockingly considered and well-done difficulty balancing do give me some hope, but since all of the well-done difficulty examples were more linear in their structure without side-content or grinding maps available to the player, I'm not too hopeful. Also I really hope for IS to spread unit recruitment out more and keep mid-chapter recruitment, I sorely missed both in 3H, especially since unit bases and how you recruit them are such an important part in giving units distinct gameplay variety (especially since pre-promoted older/more experienced characters and enemy converts are such a key part of the series' identity to me).
It really feels like story fighting gameplay in one game. I feel like the "simulation" label fits more with the support system, and the SRPG fits the perma-death combat. It is hard to find a balance between x-com and advance wars vs (what I assume) final fantasy tactics does.
I will always play with classic mode on, except if I choose a higher difficulty I know I won't be able to beat on classic, or it would get really boring. I personally think it's ok to reset since you get the punishment you should have. If you always reset, you can't progress until you manage to not get one of your units killed. I don't see it as reversing the outcome, more so "all right, I'll try again, that wasn't a good strategy". I see it as falling in a pit in Mario. Do you respawn right after the pit? No, you go back to the beginning of the stage, s you try again, because you failed. Well in fire emblem, if I messed up, I don't want to move on. I want to conquer that challenge. So just leaving units dead makes me feel like I'm missing something. But of course, I always consider permadeath a choice. Sometimes, they will stay dead, if I don't feel like replaying a chapter. also, great video. Made me realize some stuff about permadeath. Like fe7 encourages reset more than I thought. Although no mention of Path of Radiance imo pretty much says "this game did it well", and oh boy it did. In path of radiance, I NEED to do an iron man run. Otherwise, I'll feel like I'm not using all my units. When they die, they have to be replaced, simple. They all have personalities, etc.
I'm not trying to argue that resetting a chapter to try new strategies isn't valid. But my point was more so that if everyone resets until every chapter is cleared perfectly, did anyone truly have a unique experience playing the game? The difference between Mario's Bottomless Pits and Fire Emblem's Death is that someone dying in Fire Emblem allows for that variance with outcomes. You could reset, but you could also keep going and shouldering the loss. The latter, I've grown to realize is just more interesting of an outcome. PS. Me not mentioning Path of Radiance wasn't necessarily code for "this game did well". It's more that the game didn't make any substantial alterations for or against Permanent Death, and I just didn't want to make the video longer than it needed to be as this was about the ways it has changed. It's the same reason I didn't go far into FE3, 5, or 8 either.
@@ChrisTheFields ahhhh makes sense. Yeah, I see your point why permadeath creates a new experience. But that's why I think Iron Man runs are interesting. I was once doing an Iron Man run of Path of Radiance. I didn't go far though. I stopped by myself, not because of a game over. I think experiencing your first playthrough with resets is perfectly fine, but I agree that retrying the game with an Iron Man run can be very interesting. Otherwise, you don't see the reason for new units that are weaker than your current ones. You're not SUPPOSED to use them, you're supposed to use them if your other units died. ANd I realize that the game Is fairly balanced that way. Notice how at the end of Path of Radiance, or almost any other FE game, your units are way stronger than the enemy? That's because you never had to replace them for inferior units, because of reset. In fact, that's what convinced me to try an Iron Man run of Path of Radiance. I realized the game was balanced that way. I wanted to experience the loss of a unit and having to replace them with alternatives I didn't find good. About the "having a unique experience playing the game". I totally understand, but I don't think someone just dying is enough. When someone dies, you only miss out on future content, nothing more. Sure, that's painful, but that's all. I wish you would get extra content if some of your units died. That might sound like fe11, but that's not what I mean at all. I'm not talking about an extra chapter or something. I'm talking about characters acknowledging deaths more than just immediately after. Something like this happens in Path of Radiance, where Muarim is mentioned in one of the support conversations and the dialogue is altered if he's dead. That's the kind of thing I want to see, but times 10. Many characters have relationships between each other, and those could be reflected with their deaths. Maybe some characters would have a different dialogue in the story if their partner died for example. What if Rolf wasn't willing to listen to Ike if you let Boyd die? What if Rolf would hate Ike, and have base conversations with him. When a unit that had an incomplete support, why not have base conversations that allow them to say what they think about that person they were growing closer to dying? Now, if THAT was a thing in the game, I would ALWAYS do an Iron Man run. Because then it would feel like my own personal experience. But when all I get is Ike making a disappointed face after the chapter and no mention of the character again, what did I get different from someone who reset? It's the same thing, except they got more content than me. Sure, that would require a lot more dialogue, but it would be so much worth it. I wish I had more examples, but I don't. Some characters that are very impulsive could end up hating Ike for the next few chapters and get their biorythm lowered. While other more optimistic characters would say they can't give up now that they lost so much, and get their byorythm boosted. What if every character got an ark with base conversations if their partner died? Or just more dialogue that reflects their deaths. In fact, a way to make it more impactful would be to wait a random number of chapters before having the loss brought up. What if at one point you have a base conversation with, say... Mist. She mentions how she's still sad about Brom dying, 6 chapters after his death. Even though Mist had no supports with Brom, she still knew he was fighting for his family and thinking about them everyday with his little stones. Ike and Mist start talking about Brom for the base conversation. Now THAT, would make it feel like a character really died. When someone dies in fire emblem, I always feel like it has no consequence in the story and characters, only in the gameplay. If this base conversation system was a thing, I'd feel like it had a big consequence in the characters. Plus, this could give more spotlight to characters who don't talk after their recruitment. It could be a character that had nothing to do with the dead unit, as long as they can give a reasonable reason why they would care about that character's death. Plus, you'd still learn about the unit you let die. You could have learned that stuff in a support conversation, but you learned about it in a base conversation instead. So to recap, you got: extra conversations that are personalized to the units you let die, a unit is now gone but can be replaced by a future one that will be recruited, background for the character that died. Or, you can keep the unit, get supports, and that's it. I think a system like that would be SO MUCH better. NOW, I'd feel like I'm playing a personalized playthrough. But as it is now, I don't see the consequences of letting someone die beyond missing content.
Resetting isn't a choice the game gives you resetting has to be there because the console needs a failsafe and this is my problem with reset advocates🤦
@@cringekid3993 when you suspend your game, the game lets you choose between "resume chapter", or "restart chapter". Sure, it has to be there for when the lord dies, but still. Speaking of lords, what do you do when they die? Do you end your playthrough right there? No of course not. Everyone KNOWS you're going to restart the chapter (unless you're doing a challenged run, and this is not what the topic is about at all). So yes, resetting IS part of the game. That doesn't mean it's intended to be used when a unit dies though. But you can do it. And yes, sometimes, you'll get better characters later. That's not always the case though. If a unit is too important for your army, replacing isn't really a choice. And if you want to get a specific pairing for the lord at the end of the game, I'm not going to just let the game take that away from me. It's a choice. Do you want to keep going, but have that unit stay dead, or lose all your progress in that chapter until now to attempt to keep that unit alive. Believe it or not, this is an extremely well balanced system. In my very recent BInding Blade run, I let units that were useful die because I didn't think they were worth it. I didn't reset in hope that I'd get good units later on. But when a very important unit died, I couldn't let that go, and of course, I reset. So yes, resetting is a choice the game gives you. Because you can reset without even resetting the console or the game for most titles. And both choices have ups and downs. And besides, what does it matter to you? Play however you want, why do you try to force your mindset to other players?
How am I just finding this video? The topic is interesting to think about. Personally, I have an issue with how inconsequential most deaths are in the games. Most of the time if a unit dies you get their death quote, and the ending card says "X fell at chapter Y." I'm not saying everybody needs a 5-minute cutscene when they die, but a few things changing in the story would be nice. A couple of examples the series has done: multiple different scenes can play out depending upon if certain characters stay alive, die, or are captured in Thracia chapter 5; a handful of support conversation in Path of Radiance change slightly if certain characters are dead or if done during certain parts of the game; a base conversation changes depending upon if a specific character is alive, in a specific army, or dead late into Radiant Dawn (my personal favorite example); the characters' reactions to loved ones dying after battle and their ending changes as well in Echoes. Also I don't think that every game in the series needs to follow Kaga's philosophy. The irony of saying that with my pfp is not lost on me.
i remember Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume’s permadeath mechanic having a full death scene for every character in the game that would play after the map, but i think that game’s playable cast isn’t even 30 chars
X-Com did permadeath in a very tangible way, you didn't lose just units, you lost your headcanon for those units as well. Their history, what they were fighting for. Another great thing in Enemy Unknown is the philosophical questions around death and sacrifice, What are you willing to do for victory against an enemy that wishes you dead or enslaved? What are you willing to give up? your life? your body (Mec Troopers), your mind? (Psi) your very humanity? (genetic modification). Every part of EU screams sacrifice and the embrace of death for the cause of freedom. It's something I wished Three Houses would touch during the massive hypetrain of "Kill every last one of them". It didn't deliver tho.
More notably, you have near infinite replacements. Every FE game has a limited cast, and players can only recruit so many characters- XCOM can generate as many as you need, so long as you don't blatantly game over.
I think i enjoy permadeath in games like XCOM more because the units are infinitely replaceable, but it also hurts much more to lose them since i made them, i gave them a backstory, a design, a personality, i got attached to these characters because i made them and saw them become stronger alongside me, and to then see them die is honestly fucking sad as shit.
I haven't played 3H so I don't know how it handled this, but-- something that I think you could have talked about that to me really defanged "permadeath" in FE13 and FE14, was... how many of them weren't actually deaths. Far too many are canonically just characters retreating from the battlefield. This has been a thing in older games already, because the plot can't go on without some of the more important characters who are also playable, eg Seth in FE8, but FE13 and FE14 REALLY got far too liberal with it. Like, really, no first gen female unit in FE13 can actually die? The kid units are already said to be from a parallel universe, not the future-- their moms dying wouldn't make a time paradox. And I get that it would be extra writing to make the script work with missing characters, but to not even try? Oh no, X character pops into a few main campaign cutscenes, now they can't die. The abscence of characters in cutscenes if they died in your file is something really poignant to me. I've never done an Iron Man run, but I vividly remember practicing the chapter in FE9 where the Greil Mercenaries are fighting off that middle of the night attack on their base, and in one practice run Oscar and Boyd died, and I played it through to the end and checked out the cutscene. And they were just... Gone. They didn't speak up when the characters were talking about leaving, Greil didn't direct them on what to do to help pack up... The other characters didn't acknowledge the deaths-- the script wasn't complex enough for that-- but the silences were absolutely haunting. You talked about every playthrough being unique with permadeath, and I think this is exactly what you're talking about. Such a huge chunk of the cast going "oh no, I must retreat to live another day, though I will never fight again" to make the plot exactly the same, just... takes a lot of that away. Every member of the Greil Mercenies has a big part of the plot in the beginning of FE9, and it would have been easier to give them all death passes to keep them in the script, but the fact that they can die and that the close-knit Mercenaries can get gaping holes in it really enriches the game. Btw, this video is super well done, it's a crime that it doesn't have more views.
Thank you for the lengthy comment! The reason I didn't talk about how permadeath changes the story in context to what characters died is because... well, to be honest, I didn't think about it. My intended scope of the video was covering permadeath from the standpoint of a game mechanic. But I love the point you talk about in regards to the acknowledgement of character deaths to sell the narrative even further. Something you might not have realized is that FE9 actually DOES acknowledge character deaths, depending on the context. I know for sure that if Oscar and Boyd die within Chapters 1 or 2, Ike will apologize to Titania for being careless. When Rolf eventually joins, his recruitment dialogue says he wants to avenge his brother's death, rather than just saying he can protect himself. I've heard that if a lot of people died over the course of the game, Ike's dialogue reads like he's become bitter from the war. Though this much I'm not well learned about. You're right in the sense that it's not deeply complex, but unfortunate souls would see these snippets of dialogue. Even then, it's the most dynamic example in the series. Although most games don't even attempt to. The thing that makes it difficult to really encapsulate is that a solution is not as easy to pinpoint for how this could be implemented. This is something that Fire Emblem has always struggled with, even from the NES days. The easiest solution is for the playable characters to not be involved in the story. Though, most FE fans would not be down with that approach. You could replace characters like Seth with generic soldiers to say the intended dialogue as a stand in. But even then, what if those characters need to recite information that only Seth would know? Bottom line, a video game has too many factors of who can die when that a narrative would need to be designed around this consideration, and even theoretically that sounds like a logistical nightmare. And in my opinion, a game should be made with gameplay first. Either way, thank you again for the comment. This line of questioning could be the seed for a greater discussion on this focus.
@@ChrisTheFields Whoa, I never knew FE9 actually acknowledges the deaths like that, that's awesome! I always reset for deaths and only saw this particular example because I was practicing a chapter and played through to the cutscene out of curiousity. I would love for FE to do more of that! Not writing a pathed script and keeping characters who appear in cutscenes alive is easiest, but you could do some incredible narrative stuff if you did, like Ike becoming more bitter is an amazing touch. The gameplay vs story concern is a very good point-- some characters, like our example of Seth, would really change too much to feasibly permakill, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to try to write in deaths for EVERY character besides the lords/avatars. But some effort could be put into removing or replacing other characters who DO speak up past their recruitment chapter. I actually looked up who gets a get-out-of-death-free pass in FE13 and FE14 instead of relying on my vague impression, and man, giving first gen women in Awakening and first gen men in Fates an automatic pass immediately knocks out half of the mandatory cast. After that, in Fates there's all the female royal siblings, Felicia, Rinkah, Gunter, Yukimura, and Scarlet. In Awakening, it's Frederick, the Feroxians, Say'ri, and... Virion? Some of these are very fair, the Fates royals are obviously crucial to the plot and Frederick would be a lot of work to replace, but the others, I dunno about some of them. You could probably have random soldiers share information these characters did in a lot of these cases. The sparing of Rinkah's life took place long before she was recruitable, and lol what did Virion even do after you recruited him that couldn't be cut or replaced? Fates dads' immortality, btw, didn't make sense to me at first, because it's not like there's any potential time paradoxes. But then I realized that it's because they play such a large role in their childrens' recruitment chapters-- and that's probably the real reason the potential moms of Awakening can't die either. I think a potential workaround could have been giving patents *conditional* immortality-- if their child has been unlocked but has not yet been recruited, they merely retreat, but otherwise, chop chop they go. There's precedent somewhat-- nobody dies in Lyn's Story, but they can die in Eliwood's/Hector's. But if the writers had been willing to put in the time and work, I think child recruitment chapters where the main parent is dead could have made for some really moving scenes. Just imagine what it would have been like for the Awakening kids-- they finally made it to a world where their parent(s) should have still been alive, but instead, they were too late. And the Fates kids must have been waiting till the day they could join their parents in the main world instead of having just those occasional visits throughout their upbringings, but now their parent(s) are gone, and they'll never be able to. What missed opportunities from a writing standpoint! Something else I thought of is that, if the script does acknowledge deaths or changes things-- most players wouldn't even see those changes, because I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of players, when one of their units dies, reset the game. But what would all players see? Their unit dying, and that character's heartbreaking last words. You brought up that FE is classified as a simulation game in Japan, and that's really interesting to me when considering this aspect. Because your units in this war simulator aren't nameless, faceless soldiers. These aren't just military units, shrunken little faceless sprites. These are characters, with names and faces and stories, that the game gets you to know and love. And the game puts the lives of these characters in your hands. It makes you get attached to them, and then it makes you work to make sure they don't die. That's, I think, the real reason why almost everyone resets, and why it's so hard to keep going after a death. Not just for gameplay reasons, but emotional ones. You don't just want to keep them alive because you've invested your time and resources into them and don't want to have to play without them. You want to keep them alive because you love them. And if they die, it's your fault. That, to me, is one thing that makes Fire Emblem stand out from any other game. It's always been a part of its heart. And I think a lot of that has been undermined, at least in the two post-mainstreamification FEs I've played. It's not because the game has become more accessable-- its increased accessability in "casual" mode is unrelated to the changes made in "classic" mode. The changes in permadeath from the non-gameplay standpoint are unnecessary, and feel like they're coming from a place of... not being willing to put in the work, and quite possibly, the changes in what the dev team considers to be "Fire Emblem-ness." I would LOVE to see you explore this topic in a video, I'm sure you would have a really interesting analysis! I need to check out your other videos, I see you are a man of culture with those Golden Sun videos! (Though, I've never played Dark Dawn-- I got a copy at release but never got around to it...) This video actually made me want to pick up my copies of all my FE games and finally beat em, I've only beaten FE13 and FE14 despite being into the series since they first came to the states almost 2 decades ago! Usually I go overboard with grinding and then get bored, lol. Maybe this time I'll finally do it!
The reality is the opposite however, the characters either have to be "crippled" and "dead" for the sake of combat but still alive to keep the plot functional, or you get the one sided nature of their interactions from Path of Radiance where nobody ever interacts with each other _too_ directly because the game has to be written like a telltale game, once a character has the ability to die, they turn into a dead man walking. At best the writers can put a scene in the game that players that lost that character will just never see, but mostly the character will spend the rest of their time in the story dropping one liners that nobody even directly acknowledges. The reality is the older games set up "reminder" scenes to try and hit you in the feels when somebody is dead altering entire dialogue exchanges, but it's still just that, a quick exchange to remind you that YOU lost a unit. I play Rimworld and I'm no stranger to losing characters I love, while I don't use the "ironman" modes in Rimworld in case something truly unfair happens (and when you have over 300 mods installed to rimworld this happens often enough to make ironman mode a liability) I usually don't reload a save just because I lost somebody. But the way the story is told there is just fundamentally different, being that the story is entirely emergent. I'm not opposed to "permadeath" when done right. The problem with Fire Emblem is that there's no real story impact when you lose a character, but because there's a lack of generic units you can refill your roster with, there's a massive gameplay impact for losing them... which frankly is not a good impact. All the characters are either written to be easily dropped from the script, or they literally don't even die from the permadeath mechanic anyway, but the problem is you can end up in the "hero limp" near the end of the game when you enter the fight with some underleveled units carried by the characters that force a reset whenever they die. Eventually yeah, you can end up in a situation where it's impossible to beat the game because you lost too many units, and many entries into the series have a finite amount of XP leading to even more restrictive strategic decisions. Essentially, despite my love for the games, Fire Emblem games are actually not very well designed games, we love them sure but they're honestly not great games. These are flagrant issues with the core design, perma death in most fire emblem games don't work, awakening had the ability to play through DLCs multiple times so you never ran out of encounters and the DLC also brought with it a LOAD of characters you could bring into battle. So you lose a character, that's fine go grab Micah and spend some time in the XP and Money grinding levels, overuse a weapon then go into the item DLC to get some replacements for the legendary weapons. It's funny how these "pay to win" DLCs really ended up making this game one of the better permadeath games, while simultaneously making half the roster unable to die in permadeath anyway so they can stick around for the story.
The reason why in awakening no girls can die is not because of the kids - the fathers of every child can die after recruitment and that counts. The reason is because whoever Chrom marries basically becomes a secondary main character, appearing in several cutscenes that make no sense if they're not there. That being said, I really dislike Awakening's handling of this for the same reason as you, and wish it only applied after someone got to S with Chrom. That would be far less egregious. Though on that subject, Awakening has a far worse example of this in my opinion; Virion, the archer you get at the start of the game, appears in one cutscene in Chapter 13, and this means he isn't allowed to die for the entire fucking game. Like, really? REALLY? And to make matters worse, because of all the rest of the stuff with Awakening, Virion is the straw that breaks the camel's back and ensures that out of the team you have in the prologue and Chapter 1, not even ONE of them can actually die for real.
I strongly believe that, if we remove permadeath, there still needs to be consequences if you lose a unit in battle. As a war game there needs to be stakes, otherwise why even use the board for combat? I think that there should at least be a strike system. If you lose a unit they come back the next chapter with lowered max health and weakened stats. If you do it again they get benched for the rest of the game. Perhaps in the story too your reputation as a tactician begins to plummet around others if you are careless in combat. There just needs to be some form of punishment in place so that players aren't just exploiting the fact that their units will come back just fine later and get careless in battle. My biggest fear with removing permadeath is that the combat will go from an engaging, strategic chess game where every move counts to just blindly throwing around action figures and praying for the best.
The question is, will it be optional and some people use it. Or force it and we go back to the old, something didnt go as i wanted, i reload. I enjoy permadeath but i have to admit, if i liked a character i reloaded my saves when they died. So it would need a lot of player will to not fall back to the reloading save tactic when it didnt went as wanted.
@@TheFjne I think I'm fine with still having the option to do a mode without this. Maybe have three difficulties Classic, Phoenix, and this idea I'm pitching which would be the default. Something that still punishes you if you're careless on the battlefield, but not as harsh as immediate permadeath. Instead of losing your unit forever the first time their health reaches zero you just get a slap on the wrist and a warning. Then the second or third time you let them die, which is when I think you should be able to know better, *then* they're out of the game for good. They can still come up in cutscenes. Basically it'd be like in the classic games where some units are implied to just be out of the fight because they were hurt so badly from the chapter where they "died". Or maybe there's just a cutscene of them getting fed up with you mistreating them on the battlefield and quitting outright. Only taking part in story cutscenes outside of combat. There's a lot you could really play around with here.
I've played a game like that. I think it was called Rondo of Swords. You lost a unit? They were injured the entire next map. Reduced stats, couldn't go on side quests to class change/shopping missions, etc. They basically were force benched. They wouldn't die if you deployed them injured, but the penalty made battles so much harder, you were likely to injure other units keeping them alive. The only perma-death in the game was optional and caused a split path, but the only reason to ever choose it (IMO) was to see the other plotline once and never again because you give up such a powerful unit to get it (it was also the evil route, now that I think about it)
If permadeath is removed, you just need to make the game harder overall to compensate for allowing people to die. Triangle Strategy allows your units to die, but enemy units are actually a decent threat and take multiple hits to kill and none of your own units are stupidly OP. In Triangle Strategy, if you tried doing something like throwing the Dimitri/Byleth equivalent into a 1v3, they’d get annihilated. So when you lose a unit during battle, it really hurts because you were dealt a heavy blow to your strategy (losing a crucial healer, DPS, a tank, etc) and the enemy numbers can snowball and overwhelm the rest of your army.
@@NerdMiGerd yeah but what if one of your characters dies because the enemy got a lucky 1% critical hit? Am I suppose to punished for that? even after i made sure to not have anyone die off?
See, I never minded resetting the game, I always felt it added to the challenge. I've been playing since 7 came out in the US, and what I think spoiled the heart of the series isn't casual mode, it's the ability to grind endlessly. Exp used to be a finite resource, now you can steamroll through entire chapters with an extra hour or two of killing bandits.
I have to admit that even though I'm an older gamer I started Fire Emblem with Awakening and my sole condition for buying was upon knowing I had the option to "turn off" the permadeath. I can't state how much I despise it. Now, after that I have played some games in the series with permadeath and they were fun but getting the 1% critical right in your favorite character doesn't help the cause. Another nice thing about being able to opt out of permadeath is that like this I can still play on harder difficulties without the fear of soft locking myself.
this is one of the best essays on fire emblem's permanent death I've seen i would like to add though path of radiance has large dialogue changes depending on who lives or dies. if oscar and boyd die before that mission where you rescue mist and rolf then you see mist say how she knows she's safe because her brother is coming, rolf in response cries about his brothers' deaths and mist comforts him. brilliant incorporation of gameplay to narrative
It's sad how the game that literally handled the storytelling best still has plenty of examples of how the permadeath stilts the character usage. They can have a couple "moments" like that to drive home when characters are dead, but the reality is Oscar and Boyd being capable of dying means that they can't really be alive in the plot either. They can't do or say ANYTHING that moves the plot forward leaving to them being "dead men walking" where they can't really do or say anything of importance because they might be dead. Of course the gameplay of Path of Radiance is also one of the worst games to lose a unit, with finite XP and units, losing those two could be RIP for the run.
@@SherrifOfNottingham I think that was going to be the purpose of Supports before it got changed. FE9's Supports do a whole lot in backending character progression and sometimes weaving it in with the main plot. It's not the best or anything, but I do think it was the great way to get both story and permadeath. So Oscar and Boyd don't need to be plot-important to be lovable and interesting characters. In fact, I think the characters being plot-important is helping ruin permadeath. What a lot of characters need to be is MC(s)-important. Where they have an impact on the MC(s)'s character development or any other important character's development. And some characters can have impacts on other units developing.
starting out this series, i had a pretty strong aversion to permadeath. hell, my first ever Fire Emblem playthrough was Fates Birthright on _Phoenix._ then, when i went back and played the GBA games, i realized that i was actually having more fun with the intensity of knowing that one bad move could remove a character forever.
during my first playthrough of fe3h (specifically on silver snow) the only character i lost was shamir, because there was nothing i could have done at that point to save her. and god, that was rough, even for a side character. with a roster so small and all of the value she provided now gone, i couldn't really fill the gap left behind within a realistic time frame. as much fun as permadeath can be in terms of strategy, im glad 3 houses made a way around it with how intensive character building is.
FE3H was really, really not built for permadeath. I’ve played through it almost 5 times now and this run I lost Caspar. He still shows up in the monastery to taunt me that he’s still alive despite not appearing in any cutscenes.
@@sallywong5788 I find it hilarious the characters are still there talking, for some reason. It really does make it feel less impactful, though. I do like how they have a greyed out epilogue chapter, though.
@@lizagarnet7529 Yeah. They also get a short sentence in the ending explaining what happened to them post-timeskip. Usually they die, disappear, get married (with some unhappy implications), or otherwise are away from the fighting.
For me it was Raphael, but it was fairly early on and I had barely interacted with him, so I just convinced myself he wasn't worth going back for. I still feel awful about it
What an incredibly written, storied, and edited video. I love this series and this topic has always been a point of contention for new, but I never was able to put my finger on it. Thank you for this
I think one game that does the death mechanic extremely well is the Tactics Ogre series, namely the "Let Us Cling Together" title. Instead of units croaking immediately upon losing their HP, you have a set amount of turns to revive them (or until they revive on their own, depending on the type of unit that just died). And even if you don't manage to revive them in time, they vanish from the battlefield and are placed back in your army. *However,* unlike Casual Mode from the more recent FE titles, LUCT handles death by giving every character 3 hearts and every time a character dies on the battlefield, they lose a heart once the battle is over. Once all 3 hearts are depleted, the character will then die. I personally think this death mechanic allows for players to have less incentive to simply restart their game once their unit dies, knowing that their unit will still be alive after the battle ends, albeit the penalty isn't exactly large but at least it gives you an incentive to not be so risky with your strategy if your units have been dying too often while also not being too headstrong on the perfect victory without any deaths. The game also features a rewind system, which many players in all turn-based strategy games are strongly against but, if anything, LUCT keeps track of which battles you have won with and without using the rewind system. So you can still feel accomplished knowing you've won some of your toughest battles without having to rely on a crutch, but casual players who don't necessarily care much for perfect records can safely rewind time in case of a mistake on their part. Also, while the rewind feature is unlimited, you can only rewind back up to 50 unit turns taken which also counts the enemy units' turns. If FE could implement something similar in regards to perma death and rewinding, I think a lot more of the playerbase would be satisfied.
A very well argued and reasonable video. Personally, whatever they do next, whether Permanent Death continues or is removed, I just want them to commit, and make a game that knlws what it wants to be. Awakening and Three Houses are held back by trying to have Permanent Death when the games really aren't built around it.
That's exactly why I said the potential removal of Classic Mode would be controversial, but potentially beneficial. I don't know if Intelligent Systems will ever be brave enough to make that call, as it would be completely taking out something linked to the identity of the series for over 30 years. But I would actually be willing to entertain what a "Casual Mode Only" Fire Emblem game looks like, as it could allow for some interesting shake ups, even if only for just one new experimental entry.
It would be really simple for them to just design without casual and turnwheel in mind. Make the game expecting players to lose units. That way the turnwheel isn't basically mandatory. We have seen what designing a game without permadeath is like and many aspects of gameplay suffer. I don't think they should commit to casual either because there are plenty of other games without permadeath that people can play.
As someone who has only tried a handful of Fire Emblem games (All three Fates, Echoes, Awakening, Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, Three Houses) and has actively disliked all of them except Three Houses, I think removing permadeath would be a horrible idea and kill my interest in any future games. Losing a unit in Three Houses is so crippling that you'll pretty much always want to restart but I don't think that defeats the point of permadeath. Having to restart is still punishment and even knowing you're going to do it if you fail, it encourages you to play much smarter and more tactically, thinking carefully about your moves so you can avoid having to do that. And for the times an enemy gets a dumb 1% crit or your unit misses a 98% hit, I think Divine Pulse is a great solution, though I wish they'd limit the amount of pulses you could get more like in Cindered Shadows. I'm currently doing a Maddening Classic run of Crimson Flower and I restart if I lose my Divine Pulses and then lose a unit. Yet I'm still having an absolute blast. It just wouldn't be as fun or satisfying without Permadeath having that threat of needing to restart and start from 0 and it's made me a much better player than Maddening Casual would have. At this point I don't think I could even go back to Normal or Hard because of how boringly easy it is by comparison lol.
@@zyvan3179 This. The devs should design the gameplay without considering the mechanics that negate permadeath's impact as well as give us an option to disable them should we so wish.
23:36 Hi, hello, yes, I'm basically one of those people. The only game with mandatory permadeath I've enjoyed is Darkest Dungeon, and even with that I didn't like it until recently. What changed is that my friends wanted to do a blitz through the game, of which I had only played 12 in-game weeks before, and we had to choose each others' team compositions and run them until we couldn't anymore. I'm currently sitting on 3 teams I cycle between, with some throwaway units I had to use because one of my friends decided my team against the Necromancer would include one unit from each of two of my teams, throwing my balance off entirely. So what makes me enjoy Darkest Dungeon's permadeath? Well, aside from the fact that I can't do anything about it, it's honestly not all that impactful. You get so many new units all the time, and everyone is so close to the same power level to begin with, and you can just spend gold to add any skills you want the unit to use. It's honestly really difficult to care about any particular unit. In fact, it's really easy to start hating particular units instead; Reynauld, the starting Crusader, was a kleptomaniac and kept stealing shit, but I couldn't get him to die in combat, so I just released him. Training up new units can end up being cheaper than maintaining your current units, too. Oh, and when a character does die, sometimes you can find their head as an equippable item that has mega stats on it, so it can be super beneficial to just let them die. Finally, from a thematic angle, you're not one of the mercenaries, you're an aloof estate owner trying to reclaim your rightful inheritance with cheap labor. Why should you care about their lives? Compare this to even XCOM 2, the only one in the series I've played. This game also has faceless units, but these units are far more significant because they need to level up to start accessing their specific skills, which means they have to go into combat at their weakest. The game doesn't lighten up because you have weak units, whereas in DD you can just do lower-level dungeons very easily. So any unit loss is not only a huge loss of investment, but it's also significantly weakening your squadron not only for the current mission but also in the future, as you get new recruits who can't handle the war. In this environment, I'd much rather restart the chapter than risk my entire squad getting killed next chapter from a rookie not being able to do their job. Now look at Fire Emblem. Not only do your characters get better stats and access to better weapons over time, but they also have personalities, hopes and dreams. They're actual characters, nearly all of them. And when they die, you're not only losing that mechanical investment, you're also losing that emotional one. If I get attached to a character, I'm not going to let them die, it's that simple. So why, then, do I play Fire Emblem in Classic Mode instead of Casual? And bear in mind, Awakening was my first title, so it was always a choice for me. Well, two reasons. First, I want the reminder that I need to restart. The death dialogue is a lot darker than the retreat dialogue, and that's a poignant kick to restart. The second is that Casual mode is still a huge punishment because dead units can't earn XP, which makes them weaker for the coming battles. It's not as harsh of a punishment as permadeath, but it's still something I want to avoid at all costs. I mean, who wants their army to be weak? This is also why I will be resetting in any games that use any sort of "alternative permadeath" mechanic. I don't care that Jerome the Cat Wizard is going to still be alive at the end of the battle, the grave wound he got is cutting his damage by 30%, that could be the difference between a successful clear and a full party wipe. I'm resetting to find a better course of action. Basically, in order for permadeath to be a mechanic I actually like seeing, the punishment needs to be minimal. It's why Roguelikes are my favorite game genre; win or lose, you have to start a new run from the beginning, so who cares if you die? Darkest Dungeon is the same way. The units' class is what matters most anyway, so who cares if your Vestal dies? You've probably got 3 or 4 more in reserve anyway, plus 2 coming in on the stagecoach this week. But when the punishment for losing a unit is more severe, it sets up a negative feedback loop of the game getting continually harder as the punishment makes you more likely to fail, so you're more likely to get more punishments that make you more likely to fail again.
You just perfectly described my experience with ALL of these games. The only difference is that I don't think the punishment being minimal is the right choice for the game, but unfortunately, I have so many games I want to play, stuff I want to watch, and work I got to do, that I can't allow myself to play a game that punishes me to a point where I might have to play the whole game again, be it for different endings or the literal game over that XCOM has. I wish I had the time and patience to play FE7 with no resets, but I don't.
The moment Reynauld the insane cleptamiac died I felt It, maybe I get easily atached by graphics and numbers, but seing the hunter withouth his insane Knight friend was sad
@@keyman245 Oh, Dismas didn't survive all that much longer. I don't remember exactly when he died, but he was the first. I have his head now, it's a fantastic item.
I think you encapsulated the difference between different types of games with permadeath. -Disposable, no unit is significantly different from others and losses are replaceable. -Technically/tactically valuable, a character is either more powerful than others or effectively irreplaceable. The loss of a character makes the game harder looking forward. It may achieve this by costing the player in-game abilities and/or resources or out of game resources like time. -Emotionally valuable, as players develop emotional connections with characters they are compelled into taking better care of their units.
Your analysis of the shift from 6 to 7 is excellent, highlighting many notes I had myself -- accessibility of new units is a totally Japan thing that never came to the US. I think the Elibe games may also hide the answer to the question, as well: the hidden-values path exclusivity of certain paths. The replacement-unit system of the DS FE1 remake doesn't work so well because the original content is all old stuff, but I think locking some characters behind death-gates or Classic mode or various other esoteric hidden values that the public won't necessarily know on release day is an option.
Permanent death could be improved maybe if instead of introducing replacement units, the enemy unit that kills the player unit becomes a named antagonist with a prepared story for when the specific player unit becomes killed. It would be a considerable amount of depth to consider, so maybe a handful of specific characters with storied antagonists and then some that are written with generic purpose based on a number of units dying.
Sounds like you need to check out Wildermyth. Turnbased tactics with a pretty cool take on permadeath. The first time your unit falls in battle, you can choose to have them survive the battle at the expense of taking a permanent injury that will affect their combat and story, or you can have them go out in a blaze of glory, doing one huge final attack. This, combined with the procedurally generated storytelling, make losing a character in combat a memorable story beat instead of a reason to reset. Highly recommend this game to any FE fans out there. Or just any fans of tactics games in general.
In a series where Lunatic Plus exists I have a hard time believing permadeath can be good design at the same time. I don't mind that the series has gone more into the rpg side of it, but if it will, what I think the series should do is go all in on units being downed being inevitable and likely to lead to a loss if you're too careless early on, along with said unit no longer being able to get exp on that map, even if they won't be gone anymore next map.
If they do want to go into this direction of the franchise while keeping itself unique with classic mode, there needs to be an incentive to keep going even with the mistakes you have made. For example, the support system in FE7 could make support bonuses permanent (but less potent) on a character if the one they are linked to is dead. Combined with the limited number of supports the games have it can make for some interesting gameplay to not only incentivise supports, but to do it as a way to have a fallback when making mistakes. Lorewise it can be that they are charging onto the battlefield with their own might and the might of their lost loved ones. (However, with the current ones having infinite supports avaliable this kind of system falls apart immediately, so idk)
Dang, you did a fantastic job man! It was fascinating to learn about each game's implementation. Love it. I've only played some of Radiant Dawn and Awakening, but you're totally right that the games encourage keeping everyone alive. Just from a gameplay perspective of losing certain units and not wanting to continue without them, let alone also from a story perspective. I like the challenge of keeping everyone alive, and if that means there's not only challenge involved but I also get to keep my favorite characters alive, why wouldn't I? It's weird 'cause there should be some amount of player attachment to make their death meaningful, but then the attachment could mean the player would rather retry the entire level or honestly even quit the game entirely, which sounds silly but I guess you could consider that character's death to feel more like the death of your journey so you have to retry from the beginning rather than continue on. As long as the death feels fair of course, which is difficult to balance in the first place. I like the idea of feeling the losses you accrue but how disconnected do I have to feel from the characters for me to be fine with continuing on? I don't know, clearly you've thought about this more than I have haha.
I do miss that in older games you get so many characters that if you lose someone, you can just keep playing without it being a huge loss. Yeah it felt bad, but it also helped the pacing a lot. FE4 became a lot more fun when I just kept playing despite losing a character. I will miss Lex, but damn, I didn't feel like backing up a save.
Permadeath has always been a point of contention for me. As one of the newcomers from FE:A, the concept of letting some characters die never sat well with me. But at the same time, the threat of losing characters and therefore thinking twice or thrice over each decision I make as well as agonizing between restarting the chapter or continuing on is something that I love about these games. This video put my thoughts into perspective and I can now see why I always hated permadeath while *still* playing the game on classic mode even in games that have casual mode.
I'm of the opinion that a lot of players are basically playing Casual mode with extra steps, whether it be through save states or resetting for anyone that dies no matter how far you get. This is why I feel that Casual mode makes sense. The way a lot of people play Fire Emblem pretty much caused the addition of it. I think that's also what's led to FE games being designed with ever shrinking rosters and basically making them parties of like 10-20 that you gotta hunker down with.
Yeah Casual mode to me is more for my convenience than anything, I just don't like how rng can make you reset a chapter to save a unit. The characters are probably one of the biggest appeals of the games so I want to keep them alive because I want to learn more about them
I wish permadeath effected the story in someway, it can be jarring when a unit dies only for them to still appear in the story or for no one to care. Adding extra scenes with character morning deaths, being swayed by deaths and having replacements for characters who appear on the story would make death feel more real and integrated into the world. If the lord's sister dies I want him to regularly bring it up even as motivation to end the war, if a supporting prince/princess dies have other neighboring rulers be wary of joining because "the prince of the green nation supported you and now they're dead" heck even have a chance for the king/queen of the nation who's prince/princess died betray you and cause extra units and bosses to appear in future battles. I'd even like to see death effect chapters i.e. imagine you have a scout character who regularly informs the lord what's ahead but they die and so now maps start with a fog of war effect until you recruit a new scout.
Personally I think they could do something of a mix between Valkyria Chronicles and that new game you mentioned. Instead of outright dying, they are knocked down. You need to send a unit over to call a medic to have them evacuated from the battlefield. If you don’t make it in time you lose the character, if you fail then the character is lost. If they are evacuated from being brought to zero then they suffer stat loss when deployed for a couple chapters. With this system it covers a number of things. 1: you have to use precious movement to decide if you want to risk saving the unit or if you want to better position or deal with an enemy. 2: you have a chance to save a unit if they fall but are not outright punished if they do. 3: getting knocked to zero still impacts them by lowering their stats, but you can use them in later missions by letting them “heal up”, so you’re punished for them falling but still eventually able to use them again.
13:13 ehhhhh I disagree. While the game does give you a ton of units, the problem is that pretty much all the mid-late game prepremotes(with the exception of Sirius) sucked and had embarrassingly low stats. On higher difficulties especially this would encourage players to keep all their early game units and keep them alive until the end of the game as any of those prepremotes you got later would be far to weak to handle the brutal enemies of the lunatic and lunatic reverse difficulties.
yeah, one of the big things that demonstrate how the newer games aren't built around permadeath is that the recruitable characters are very frontloaded, require a bunch of training, and few units you get later just aren't up to snuff. I mean, compare units like Say'ri and Alois to units like Niime or FE3 Samson
@@DuelingShade I mean in all fairness those late game characters aren’t for filling up the entire roster of dead units. They’re just meant to allow you to progress and win. That’s why you get an overpowered unit in the final maps for so many of the older games. Those units are meant to allow you a fighting chance. They aren’t guaranteed going to replace a unit that was trained, but they should be able to do damage and allow for a comeback. All those units you listed still have their uses and places even if they aren’t killing machines like a fully trained Dimitri, FE7 Marcus, Perceval, Athos, etc. It’s definitely hard to switch to using units mostly to gang up on enemies instead of one or two clearly a hallway alone, but it’s always possible because of those late game units
@@anthonynguyen1289 Yup that's pretty much what i meant, and why I brought up units like Niime rather than Perceval. Sure, units like Niime, Echidna and Douglas won't compare to a trained Raigh, Deke, or Bors, but they can at least take the spot, and they join right before you'll need their respective abilities. Compare that to conquest, if you lose one of your dark mages in chapter 13 or something, who's gonna take their spot? The one you didn't use that's still at level 9, a reclassed unit with E-rank tomes, or will you wait until chapter 23 and spend your dragon points to upgrade your hotspring to level 3 to get Izana? It genuinely seems like the game expects you to grind, or just not play classic.
@@DuelingShade oh yeah I get what you were saying. I honestly didn’t replay any of the 3ds ones so I never noticed. I think three houses while having horrible balancing did make recruiting those units very late game sorta worth it stat wise while they would lose the utility of a bunch of different class skills. So it did it in an interesting way where you could recruit them early to have them learn lots of different skills or hold off in case you need them to replace a high level unit dying randomly. I recruited Catherine super late and she was definitely serviceable. Most of the church cast have really useful utility even without class skills like Manuela warp or Shamir good arts
I think Three Houses actually touched on a brilliant possibility, by having you select 1/3 of the playable characters, have to work really hard to get more, and then have to kill every one of them that you didn't pick. After those characters die, their old friends and connections in your party always have things to say. Some are in mourning. And I think that's a huge breakthrough waiting to happen. I think the series evolving into more of an RPG, where you don't want to miss out on any story by losing characters, makes the idea of permadeath hard. BUT... imagine if the writers made a huge slew of story that would flow from character deaths. Even gameplay elements. Imagine if every time you lost a character, their Support-bonded characters would have extra dialogue or even paralogue battles where they sought solace or revenge. They could learn from their mistakes with the Shadow Dragon remake and not lock entire characters behind this, while really branching out into making a character's death feel like it's _part_ of the story, not a _flaw_ in it. Let characters build monuments to the fallen, and visit their graves. Let them retain tokens that remind them of their fallen loved ones, which grant bonuses in battle. Heck, get all sorts of wacky and let them speak with their ghosts or something, build an entire game-defining mechanic around it, idc. All I'm saying is that, if a character perma-dies and the player is able to say, "Well, at least now I can do XYZ, I wonder what that'll look like?", then I think permadeath could evolve back into the series in an amazing way.
Honestly permadeath felt better on the gba games (haven't played FE6) when I didn't feel obligated to reset unless I had to. I believe this is because of how the supports just feel like they were there just for your to grind support rank at the end of every map so I didn't do it. Yet fe16 makes death feel much worse as if I need to use divine pulse each time my brain shuts down. I've tried ironmanning hard 5 shadow dragon (ignoring the replacement characters if possible) and died from critting an enemy ruining my chokepoint. Permadeath may not be as meaningful but perhaps the option to reset is just better off. Casual mode can technically be classic but classic can't be casual.
I belive the idea of Kaga making our own story is strongly bond to the lvl up system based on RNG. On some of you "run" "save files" some character that are bad units can become good because of lucky lvl ups and became legends for one story. I think this is particulary true in Iron Man run were you must use some character to replace the dead ones. Mangs Iron Man on FE6 show that with Lot became a true hero while overall he is pretty bad. This create very personnal story. (sorry for bad english)
I'm okay with the concept of permadeath in a tactical strategy but I never liked FE's way of implementing it. I was more fond of Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyria Chronicles method of characters going down with life-threatening wounds, and you had to make a tactical choice to try and save them within the 3-turn counter before they died for real. VC also had the detail that enemy troops could move in to finish off your wounded.
Honestly classic mode allowed me as a 13 year old girl to get into fire emblem. I've still tried classic mode before but I just love the characters so I'm more likely to just reset anyways, hell I've really only used it to lose characters I absolutely hate (blue and pink haired crazy lady in fates for example) I like that it's an option to have permadeath but in a very story focused game losing your characters just is awful
People seem to have forgotten Wars, the OG simulation game. It last appeared on the DS with an entirely unique cast for a reason - Intelligent systems have no clue how to make a story without characters, and the time of games without stories where stories can be injected was 40 years ago. Wars as a series had died simply because fighting simulation was in a completely reasonable decline which only made sense to me when I picked up Shadow Dragon. My first FE was Blazing Blade and it had me insanely hooked to the story. I instantly fell in love with Lyn, Eliwood, Dorcas, Ninian, Matthew... it had me come back every day to see what's going to happen next. What atrocities will Nergal commit? How difficult will my gulps feel while sailing towards the Dread Isle, infamous for "devouring" anyone who enters? It's all making me play the game because I want to see what comes next, and that is all achieved because I care about the characters. I want to know what will happen to them next. Let's get back to the Shadow dragon. That was the next game on my bucket list after I finished GBA games since I only have handhelds. I started it, played through about half of the game and... I couldn't keep going. It's been months between each play session and I needed more than half a year to forcibly complete it. I don't think I'm ever coming back to that one, and that's coming from a player that has 100% of supports in 7 and 8. Simulation games don't make me feel anything. I don't want to play them because it feels like there's nothing to them. IS knows this, so they scrapped Wars and shifted Fire emblem towards an RPG. It's a shame to lose one of my favourite franchises to a shift in gaming industry, but at least Fire Emblem was saved and repurposed, and honestly feels better than it used to be, which is what everything strives towards anyway. I'm not very invested in the community, but I assume this one is similar to every other one, from Windows OS to Pokemon, in a way that people hate new things for the sake of not being 1:1 like the old ones so they probably disagree with me. But I absolutely wouldn't have been here if 7 wasn't a masterpiece story-wise, if I didn't care about its cast. If 7 was a simulation game, I would have dropped it before the end of it.
14:20 this actually happened to me when I first played Awakening. I never played an FE game before, so I thought "perma" death wasn't so "perma"... and yeah, by Chapter 5, I only had Chrom, Robin, Frederick, Panne, and Gaius before finally calling it quits and restarting from scratch. I still lost Panne, and was mad as hell when I realized how the child mechanic worked.
I enjoy the permadeath mechanic. It helps me to pay attention due to my actions having real consequences. That said Awakening forward have leaned heavily into the waifu side of things so people are less likely to just accept that they have to live with the consequences of their orders.
Agreed, for me personally I find the main protagonists the hottest so I don’t really suffer from that. I mainly suffer from the lack of viable replacement units, the only option available is to train my level five Ricken in chapter 18.
Maybe a good alternative to classic mode for future games is just to make any death a lose condition. That's how many people play anyway, and it keeps that extra challenge without causing problems down the line
Having an *_Enforced Permadeath Mode_* (the game constantly overwrites your save file, and if your lord dies, the save file gets deleted) would be an interesting and ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BRUTAL thing to see in a new Fire Emblem game, and I'd love to have that option available.
So I enforce it myself and as a result I haven’t beaten conquest or echos despite multiple attempts. Has much as I’ve wanted to believe an Ironman is how I would like to play I realize that fire emblem with its current requirements for a game over just doesn’t mix well with an Ironman run. Xcom is the best example of want fe would need to be in order for an Ironman to be popular. The difference between the two is that in a fe iron man if your lord dies it’s over, back to the start redo all those missions and pray for good levels all over again. Not fun. Xcom on the other hand allows you to fail some missions here and there and more importantly if you feel you’ve made a grave mistake most missions allow you evacuate your troops saving them at the cost of failing the mission. So much more engaging of a challenge. If perma death is ever going to shine in a fire emblem game it needs to adopt a more fluid form of story progression and allow a few failures along the way.
@@richardwilliams937 I think an interesting way they could do it is a story that varies it’s difficulty based on wins to losses. So essentially if the player is winning many battles the enemies tighten their defenses making the maps harder, but if you have been losing the enemies have gained more territory (essentially maps to level up on and recruit fodder) so they spread themselves thin making maps easier. There should still be differences between an easy hard mode map and an easy easy mode map. Also you should be able to retreat like you said with the story progressing. The penalty for retreating would be that the boss character of that map gets stronger and you’ll run into them again on a future story map until they die like if you retreated from all 30 chapter maps the final one has the final boss and every single chapter boss leveled to match the chapter. The boss enemies would ultimately be stronger than a generic unit of that class making the map much harder. You would still be able to kill those bosses on prior story maps. Also to balance the increased difficulty of extra bosses when you retreat you get a few side maps that don’t progress the story those are the maps written since you retreated the enemy gained territory. These maps are for leveling and extra units for any dead units. They wouldn’t have conventional bosses since the bosses are the recruitable fodder for your army. I would say maybe 3 maps so 3 new characters for every retreat and you don’t need to have loss any character and any experience gained you keep. The recruitable characters I feel can be more akin to Valkyria chronicles where they have characters but are essentially fodder with stories. Any character you recruit should be able to fill whatever role you need but be a bit weaker due to the fact they weren’t fully on your side like mercenaries not willing to die since they don’t have any loyalty yet. Also maybe the main lord has plot armor so if they die it just means you are forced into retreat losing either one random unit that was deployed or something else like experience or weapons/gold. This would only be for the forced retreats other retreats you choose to initiate you would keep everything besides units that died as it would be seen as a tactical retreat and not a desperate retreat.
I have one issue with perma-death. And it’s honestly how if affects the story. Since any character can die at any time, most characters are just exempt from important story roles and can only build character through supports.
To me, classic + rewind feels like the right setting in modern fire emblems, since I'm still strongly incentivised to solve the puzzle that is the battle map correctly, without needing to restart the whole chapter if I miss a detail. It's casual mode that feels redundant when rewinds are available (though I don't mind it being left in). I'm not realy playing with permadeath, but still play classic.
honestly, perma-death has trained me in a way that the most recent instalments have pushed me away due to ensuring that some characters are inevitably going to die. It's like... you train me to avoid the circumstance you're now forcing on me, what did you think I'd do?
You know, all that talk about how modern Fire Emblem games aren't designed with permadeath in mind got me thinking of another way Nintendo/Intelligent Systems could go about this: _What if they spilt Fire Emblem into two separate series?_ The first would retain the "Fire Emblem" name, focusing on more complex characters and intertwining stories. It could drop permadeath entirely or just keep it a formality, but it would NOT be _designed_ around permadeath. Levels would be more difficult because they operate under the assumption that the player has a unit or two they can sacrifice to get an advantage. There are advantages to designing this way, as you can make more challenging levels without fear of it becoming impossible under certain circumstances - I think levels that encourage the player to be brave and risky have some merit to them. Basically this series would follow the design philosophy of modern Fire Emblem. The other series would be similar to Fire Emblem in setting and premise, but would have a different name and _make permadeath a part of its identity._ Levels would be a bit easier but still stressful because every single move the player makes could matter. Perhaps throw in frequent autosaves so the player can't undo their mistakes, and instead help players _learn_ from those mistakes! For accessibility, there could be a mode that still punishes the player for messing up by some other means; there could also be a mechanic that prevents unwinnable situations, such as a scaling system. Most importantly, all of the marketing and messages the game presents will tell the player that _this is THEIR story._ There will be no "perfect ending," and characters will be written with the unexpected death of others in mind. Perhaps someone's untimely death will make another character's arc branch off, making each playthrough unique without players feeling like they've received less. This series would _see just how far you can take permadeath as a mechanism for storytelling._ I think there's a ton of untapped potential here! TL;DR: Perhaps instead of trying to force permadeath into modern Fire Emblem and risk compromising the artistic vision of the series as it exists today, it could be better to branch off into a separate, more experimental series that actually _revolves around_ permadeath or similar mechanics. This way there could be something that both camps will enjoy!
I think Final Fantasy Advance Tactics’ way of handling permanent death is the best, basically there were these specific areas that had no laws (laws were what’s stopping units from killing each other) so if your battle was in one of these areas you get more serious and stay more focused and when a character dies you kinda accept it, but when the entire game “has no laws” I tend to get kinda bored and not think too much about my moves which forces me to restart the entire chapter.
I feel like my take on a restructure of this mechanic would be to change how difficulty works. Instead of having your 3 levels of difficulty with the options of casual or classic, just make the 3 levels of difficulty reflect those options. The 3 levels of difficulty would be: Casual (the normal mode) Classic (the permadeath mode) Lunatic (the "ironman" mode) Lunatic and classic would not work by changing enemy numbers, stats, or skills, but by changing how death will impact your game play. Classic mode will reinforce the aspect many players enjoy where you keep resetting to find the optimal way to properly strategize and beat a map. Lunatic would enable an auto-save state when a unit(s) die, locking you into that result in that map even when resetting. In such a case, you would have to keep pressing on or start a new save file. And even when pressing on, you can still end up in a game over scenario where you will be forced to start a new file. I feel like having the game play set up this way would be an interesting step forward. Have the permadeath settings BE the actual difficulty curve instead of having to create several versions of a map for different difficulties and then slapping on classic or casual after the fact. (Edit: I think making notable enemy changes between my versions of classic and lunatic would be a good idea cuz I realize that they would be pretty really similar otherwise)
This is an interesting idea however if anyone is playing on one difficulty then you have to balance the difficultly for novices and veterans and those three difficulties wouldn't be enough to keep giving you a challenge, but it would always be nice to look for more ways to make things difficult then the generic level increase.
Just found this video, and really enjoyed hearing your take on the subject. You really gave weight to the art form that's being lost with newer Fire Emblem games, without dismissing the new strengths they've brought to the table or trying to forcibly divide the fandom. Props for the way you've handled this potentially contentious topic! Perhaps the best approach is a compromise between the personal stories that the player makes up in their head and the written stories in-game? For instance, hypothetically, if a character dies in Three Houses, then a close friend or rival of theirs won't be in their usual place in Garreg Mach but instead at the graveyard with new dialogue morning the loss. Perhaps there could even be alternate support interactions where if a character dies with one or more B rank support partners, then extra 'conversations' take place only involving the grieving survivor, thereby tying up the narrative loose ends while still leaving that tragic layer of loss. Just having a system in place so that players don't feel like the game is narratively punishing them irreparably, give them something that still feels like a loss but at least gives them some closure. As much as I resent the heavy shipping-wheel focus of Awakening and especially Fates' support wheel, the mechanics consistently did their job of giving depth to the characters and making the player care about them. The partial return to form in Shadows of Valentia really stung. There were so many characters who, once their recruitment dialogue was finished, barely mattered at all outside of their stats. Virion, a character unaffiliated with nearly all the cast and who shows up out of nowhere early Awakening, has more characterisation than two of Alm's nearly life-long childhood friends in Shadows of Valentia. For some players like myself, that is a fatal blow to their investment of those characters, something that no permanent death system can ever fix. Fire Emblem, both for better and for worse, has outgrown permadeath, with the support conversations serving as the new heart of the series. And if Intelligent Systems is going to cater to fans of both mechanics, then they'll need to bring narrative incentives, not just gameplay incentives, to play through those permanent deaths. Here's hoping they can pull that off with an upcoming instalment, because it would be a damn shame to lose either of these systems entirely.
I love Fire Emblem and interacting with the characters is the main joy for me. Playing on Classic with my beloved characters is nerve-wrecking. Yes I want the perfect endings, but it also makes me carefully consider my moves. I always have my first playthrough on a FE game on Casual. I played Fates on Classic, but felt like I just kept resetting if my favourites were killed. All this did was make me not get attached to certain characters so I can use them as cannon fodder. My first death on Fire Emblem was Arthur on Fates. Like I do not give a crap about him as I already had Camilla as my axe unit. I know people shit on Three Houses for it’s lack of stakes, but if you didn’t recruit a unit before the timeskip, they are going to die. Having characters you built support with kill each other actually creates such a sad dynamic that I would intentionally have the worst pairing attack each other (Having Ashe kill Lonato was a major one, along with killing Flayn in front of Seteth, even after knowing what is revealed in the paralogue)
I think people are unfair to Three houses in this regard. It is very different but, it went for a different style and I think it achieved it for the most part. It was so different overall i doubt its going to be done again though.
The issue of permadeath is that it's inclusion feels more like a punishment system instead of a feature. This is unlike other games where death is not the end of your gameplay experience (namely roguelikes). Fire Emblem basically punishes you twice for a death of a character: once for losing material and exp investment into said unit, once more for losing all the story associated with said character. Thrice if said character was your waifu/husbando. This results in a feature which enriches one aspect of the game, but will overpunish you if you slip up. Other games avoid this by separating characters from the narrative, often with the story told about the circumstances around the adventure rather than about the characters themselves.
The key is... permadeath only works when units are not characters with any real dialogue. Things like Rimworld and XCOM, it doesn't make the characters you make any less of a character, just that the characters can't be "written" by a person and instead have to have emergent stories and the player having their own ideas of who that character is. In things like Fire Emblem the permadeath leads to characters being written into submission, if they can die then they can't be important because otherwise it's a game over when they die. The fact that the story continues with them dead just the same cheapens their death and makes the character less impactful. Only characters 'pre-written; to die can impact the story and doing that in a tactics RPG feels awful, investing time and effort into raising a unit to have them die for the plot ruins the gameplay, especially in a game like Path of Radiance where you're dealing with finite XP
I definitely enjoyed the listen! (Just popped in the headphones while taking my doggy on a walk) I was really surprised at the mention of Dark Deity, because that game’s director had to deal with me invading his cities in Civilization while he tried to build Rome in a day xd. Now every time I hear the name of that game I’m like that meme of leonardo dicaprio pointing at the screen
Great video, echoed more or less my exact feelings on permadeath. Casual Mode as a concept is fine, but the focus on it has made Classic Mode essentially useless or overly tedious. There's no room for failure in modern Fire Emblem--you have to play perfectly. The games have never done a great job of encouraging players to continue on through their mistakes because there's little benefit to doing so. I think that's what the original intent of the Gaiden missions in FE11 was supposed to be--they weren't a handicap to help players not skilled enough to finish the game without death, they were there to encourage players to keep playing. The devs forget that players are min-maxers by nature and would instead kill off their units to do so which is unfun from a narrative and gameplay perspective. New games in the series should pick a lane--permadeath or none--the middle ground they have right now is pretty unsatisfying for me at least. If IS decides to make permadeath part of the intended playing experience then future games in the series would have to figure out how to encourage the player to *choose* to play through failure without incentivizing genocide. I've thought of a mechanic where a unit who dies drops an "essence" that is essentially a consumable that offers stats or abilities based on how much experience or battles the unit has seen would work at this. IE: if your fully-trained General dies, he drops an item that gives +4 defense and the Pavise ability to any other unit, however a freshly recruited General would drop nothing upon death. This would force the player to consider continuing on when one of their beloved units falls in battle while also preventing them from sending a bunch of new recruits on a suicide mission to make their core team better. I took the concept for this mechanic from Final Fantasy IV DS where temporary party members give you items that grant abilities based on how many abilities that you gave them while they were in your party. A Fire Emblem ironman is one of the most rewarding and tense gameplay experiences I've ever had and I would like more people to experience that. Counterintuitively, I've found that Ironmans are less stressful to play through. In normal play, I constantly overanalyze my mistakes and constantly reconsider whether or not I should redo something more perfectly/efficiently, whereas in an Ironman I don't stress about my mistakes I've already made and just keep playing. It's sad that the wider image of an ironman is that it's not for "casuals" and only for hardcore, extremely talented players when I really find the "reset at any mistake, constantly minmax" mentality to be much more of a time and headspace investment. Kaga was right in telling players to not obsess over the perfect ending.
The problem with your system is that people would still probably kill someone who’s easy to level up (like probably the Jagen character in the early game) to give all their stats and abilities to a character who starts weaker but can get better.
I always have and will choose classic on my first playthrough. With that said, I've always reset if I like or invested in a lost unit. This makes a lot of sense, as I started with FE7. I've thought about this topic a lot, but not in the context of the original game, so thanks for bringing a new perspective. I have to say overall I wouldn't change FE 3H at all, I think it's one of the best games in the series, but, I do hope the series decides to step back for the next entry, to sprinkle in characters over the course and make them feel like less of an investment like in previous entries.
It is always fun watching people bring up the diversity in Fire Emblem then looking at what we got in Smash, wish we could see some of the more unique cast there. Observations aside though... Every Fire Emblem fan still gets personalized stories, those that lose their characters in classic and those that don't. Those who pick different teams and favorites. But more importantly there is a healthy way for permadeath to exist. Final Fantasy Tactics uses a "Death counter" where if someone falls in battle you have to end the fight or revive them before the counter hits 0 or they die forever. This system has all the positives of both sides especially since revival often was reviving at low health. FFTA implemented a system where on Lawless regions if your HP hit zero you were fine as usual... unless the battle ends. Then that character dies. The reason instant permadeath gets pushed away is there is too much randomness. Critical hits, not being psychic and knowing how you build your team for 10 chapters/stages/maps from now, not knowing there were going to be 20 enemy reinforcements by the side of the map you stuck to. None of this feel organic to many people. This becomes a poison very quickly because you can only design so much before it starts being unfair or feel inorganic which is the major issue immediate permadeath has. You can't predict that critical hit yet if you do predict everything as a crit then you move so slowly it grinds everything to a halt and you have to pull Xcom and add timers. The biggest poison is if your Lord dies why does the save not delete itself? Unless you delete your save and start anew when this happens you haven't truly played permadeath Fire Emblem.
Ngl I’m starting to realise why shadow dragon and Binding blade are so fun to me and it’s got a big thing to do with how perma death feels in the game. I can play these games over and over and get a different experience
Imagine if Fire Emblem had a system like in Dark Souls where it’s CONSTANTLY saving and you CANNOT cheese it with resets. Now that would be an intense FE game in the spirit of its original roots
It would never happen because then Intelligent Systems would have to design a game that accounts for permadeath but I must say I'd go nuts if this ever happened.
@@ChrisTheFields I'd totally agree. FE's become super casual-friendly too (not a bad thing!), but this direction also heavily discourages making the new games too hard
"If something isn't making enough money to survive, its only way out is to appeal to the largest group possible, even if it means to sacrifice its integrity" - universal law
I actually came up with an idea for a Casual Mode-only mechanic while watching this video. So, if a character’s HP falls to 0 in battle, they will retreat and enter a damaged state. Either their stats will be reduced or they will be completely fatigued. Either way, the player will need to use materials and resources to heal their wounds or get their spirits back up. This will allow players to want to keep their allies alive so they don’t have to waste their resources that they’d rather use on building units and the like. It keeps the player on their toes so they feel the motivation and obligation to protect their units while also not taking away their characters forever as a punishment.
Perma death really varies per games and in a game as layered as fire emblem its so hard to implement while feeling both fair and not too gimmicky in terms of save scumming your way out. Games like realm of the mad god, which is a much simpler interpretation of perma death, seeing as you only play one character and if you die on that character you lose it forever it still lets you remake the same character but you take a while to recoup what has been lost and I feel as though something like that needs to be better added like instead of characters just dying forever theyre wounded and you have to do more to treat them in order to make them playable units again.
My first game in the series was Fire Emblem Awakening. I enjoyed it at the time, but it took me a while to get fully into it. Since then, I have played through and beaten most mainline games excluding 2,3,6, and the Tellius Games (played partially 6 and Path of Radiance but haven't finished them yet). I feel like Fire Emblem without permanent death is just any other srpg. What draws me into these games are the stories that get told through my gameplay mistakes. Ironmaning Shadow Dragon H5 has been the most fun I've had, and I grew more attached to the characters through my gameplay choices. I have memories of doing silly, cheesy strats to train bad units like Gordin, and it felt honestly rewarding. I feel sad that the newer games are growing less and less designed around permadeath which leads to poorer designs to the maps and less strategy involved (i.e. unfair ambush spawns which require divine pulse etc.) . I have to admit I do like the supports because I want to learn more about the characters, but it is sad seeing one of my favorite game series of all time going in a different direction than what I enjoy about it.
Permadeath is sort of a double-edged sword for the series. On one hand, it is one of the things that distinguished the series from other SRPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics (the first game had permadeath but is a lot more forgiving about it). On the other hand, it does come across at the expense of characterization, to be honest. There's a reason why most characters in the old FEs are just people with faces and maybe some character traits. It's basically anime XCOM. In any other series, a character like Lilina would probably have a lot more screen time in the game but in FE6 she had some screen time up to the Gaiden chapter where you get Durandal and you never see her again unless you A support her with Roy. A lot of people think that the slow degeneration of the permadeath mechanic is to draw in casuals. That's part of it sure, but I think it also has more to do with the recent direction of the series which is more focused on the characters instead of the setting at large.
Permadeath has never mattered to me personally. I've always been the type to just reset after losing a unit and would never ever do an ironman run so any changes made haven't affected the way I play.
If there wasn't permadeath, then trading one unit for another like a casual chess game would be the way you'd play because it's just more efficient to make sacrifices. Not wanting to lose a unit forces you to change the tactics you employ.
I started this series with PoR. PoR is fairly easy, but not for a beginner. I've lost almost all the Greil Mercenaries in the first few chapters on my first time playing it, 'cause the game does not explain itself very well (as intended). The story was so much empowered by this. Suddenly, all that talking about the struggle Ike and his comrades have to endure had so much meaning you actually FEEL that, with every unit lost, every character whose support and story you'll never see complete. I felt like in a war, praying, after every move I made, to get everyone out of there alive. Feeling grief when the music stopped and someone told me his last words. How emotional it was... That is Fire Emblem. Of course, today I break the game in 2 chapters and I'm aware that Lord Ike is basically an unbreakable iron brick wall that no one seem to even be able to catch (and they usually would not deal any damage anyway), which regenerates himself from the damage he deals. It was a series about WAR in every aspect of it: how we can survive it with our friends, how we can meet new ones even in such hardships, and the pain of knowing that every battle could be the end of both old and new. Today...it is more a series about how LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP end all wars. Same elements, but opposite interpretation. In the first iteration, their idea of WAR is brutal: someone will die, on both sides, no matter how good you are, well meaning, or how much you are in the right. WAR IS SHIT. In the second iteration, war CAN be brutal, but only if you're a bad guy, or if you've lost you're way. Because, if you're in the right, you have all the power you need, even if you're a toddler, to embrace your friends and defeat all the bad guys. War is a bad thing, but you're a good guy, you're friends are good too, so it does not really touch you. Excluding the narrative, taking in examination only the gameplay, these 2 ideas are basically the opposite of each other. I would also say that one is extremely educational, and the others is literally the danger of our time (to think that we're good so we can do all the bad we want to those we think are bad, because no consequence will ever touch us good guys), but that is my personal opinion that I understand can't be taken as a fact. But what's a fact is that, at this point in time, 2 Fire Emblems exist, and I'm a fan only of the first one. I always appreciated how the series touched the argument of WAR until Awakening came out. Since then, I've been less and less of a fan, and I don't think I'll buy the next one if that old spirit is not there again in full force. What made it unique for me was that bad sensation. That feeling, in the end, that I had fun, a lot, but also reflected a lot, I also felt a painful catharsis. To be honest, seeing that catharsis, that NEGATIVITY, substituted by full POSITIVITY, took away the soul from the series. And...as a strategy game alone...Fire Emblem is not really the best... I understood that the only reason why I really like Dimitri's side of TH, is because, at least narratively, the message in his route is still there. No matter if in the end he wins, he's lost sooooo much. In the other 3 routes no one ever loses anything he did not decide to give for the cause. Dimitri loses family, one eye, loyal companions, dignity, his morals, his mind, everything he could. So that message is still there in the story: WAR is bad either way. But the gameplay does not support it even in that route 'cause no one dies if you don't want to, and no character loses anything else the moment they meet Byleth again. FUCKING MUTE JESUS. 'Cause we're special, and war as no power on a such magnificent being. FUCK that masturbatory message. This series tryed to make me think, once. Now it only tries to make me cum. Out of my trousers game, have some dignity.
*Literally ambush spawns an entire army to give you a standing ovation and every single legendary weapon in the series.* That was beautiful, holy shit...I'm not being sarcastic, that was actually something I LOVE!! Some of these comments I simply agree with, but this one was an ART PIECE! Just like the video it was placed on, I loved this.
@@The_Catman No problem! Unfortunately, you died from critical praise damage so your Ironman has been squandered, sorry about that :( But jokes aside, I do genuinely agree with this, I’m still trying to beat back the vestiges of my old reset instincts, but it’s getting better.
When Rolf joined in my first FE9 run, he told Oscar that he couldn't bear to stay behind because Boyd went off to fight "and he never came back." It's been fifteen years, but I still remember. Only FE's permadeath can make you feel the weight of your decisions like that.
It should be that critical hits or hits that go well above a units HP would have the character unable to say their last words which would make it more interesting.
Tbh I believe that they should have the option for classic mode where if a unit falls in battle you can’t use them anymore that way characters can participate in the story since with classic mode it feels like the feature handicaps the story
There's a select number of units where this essentially happens anyway. In fe7 any unit that would appear in the fe6 story doesn't actually die, but are no longer usable in battle. In the case of marcus and oswin they continue to play a significant role in eliwood and hectors stories even while being unusable
I always thought that perma-death is a wasted feature for many people. The amount of people who would actually continue playing through when they permanently lose someone can probably be counted in one hand. Almost no one would willingly perma-kill a person on their first playthrough.
My first experience with fire emblem was the binding blade. Perma death really taught me that my decisions mattered. It made every kill and inch of exp more worth it. I never restarted any chapter since I was new and still best the normal ending with a very solid team, even though I killed units like Rutger. It was one of the most unforgettable gaming experienced that ive ever had. I never felt so accomplished when playing a game. Claiming this is a wasted feature doesnt feel right and I miss this feature being cord to the design since the newer games dont feel like they can balance difficulty correctly and punish mistakes...
@@geno_xi sounds like you're one of the very few people who actually played through after losing someone, as I have mentioned. I would argue that people who prefer perma-death is a minority, otherwise the devs wouldn't have made such a change in the first place.
I feel like a lot of recruitment in three houses is probably designed for new game-plus when you have more activity slots to grind for support with. The other big thing with three houses is probably the change in general dynamic compared to most games in the series. Usually, you are a commander leading an army or a royal on the run. In three houses you're a mercenary made into a military academy teacher. That puts more of an emphasis on the growth of units especially the students since their ability is built on what direction they are trained in. It creates a nice variety in builds for characters but makes casual mode look more viable since there is a limited pool of units to get and depending on how well you recruit in the first part fewer units to obtain in the later half of the game.
With the Hardcore Nuzlocke in Pokémon, if we had the ability to rename or chose the name for the other characters, losing them would be more heart breaking
As someone who started with Blazing Sword, permadeath always forced me into a choice. If I restart, then I obviously got another shot at winning without that character dying, but if I let them die, then I potentially save a lot of real time, effort, and frustration to just clear that chapter. It was always a decision that I had to weigh, and that was one of the coolest game mechanics for me.
Man, I remember my first FE. Was it sacred stones? The one with Erika and Ephraim. I didn't know there was perma-death and I was only left with plot characters, and Seth. Seth was the man, He was lvl. 20 while everyone was lvl. 7. He'd go in, get surrounded on all four corners then get out with minor scratches, rinse and repeat. He had all the nice shiny things, he got all power up items that I got. He was the storm that is approaching, and you bet he'd uproot anything and everything in his was, be it a lance wielder with horse killer. And then I read he was the weakest if you min-max everyone and that the baby units were the strongest. Still, my head canon was Seth is THE hero, and Ephraim/Erika was just riding his coattails. Fight me!!
I don't know who told you that Seth is not the absolute best when min/maxed because Seth is absolutely the best unit in that game and one of the best units in the series. He's just an absolute chad.
@@ChrisTheFields I knew it! My brother was lying! Maybe because he wanted me not to break the game, lol. And that was more than a decade ago! I had no way to confirm it. It was a cake walk with Seth tbh, maybe I shouldn't have used him? It was like, "easy" easy with him around. But then we have those units that have gimmick weapons like the bat? Dragon? Vampire? Girl that speedruns her stats like crazy, and Ephraim/Erika with their story weapons. Still, Seth is the MC for me. It was fun stumbling on this video, I might play some FE now that I remember it.
Have you ever seen "Can You Beat Mass Effect With No Friends?" Wherein the permadeath of characters in previous games ends up causing the various games' narrative to start falling apart at the seams? I understand that Fire Emblem handles that with "oh, a character just received a grievous wound that makes them only able to be a military advisor now!" so that character can be a part of the core narrative." and all, but... I think there is a way to get a Fire Emblem game to embrace permadeath; Grief. a Fire Emblem game wherein death is shown early on as inevitable and wherein Permadeath can feed into support in a powerful way; mourning happens, maybe those who had support with a character take the time to speak about that character, they gain a memento that gives them the benefits of their support as a solo unit, and having death strengthens the resolve of those who remain behind. Maybe the game sets up something early where attempting to keep the army alive through stratagem turns out to be a selfish play that has rippling conciquences when it was possible to send units on a mission that was most certainly suicide, but their valliant actions pay dividends later.
The last time a fire emblem fan did an iron man run and thought of it as playing normally was today. I was there and doga choked the hell out of that point.
Casual can still have punishment aspects to it: in a playthrough that you can't grind for EXP outside main chapters, a character dying early becomes weaker and weaker as the chapters difficulty increase...it can come to the point of not being able to complete a chapter, a "game over" "softlock".
"The more love you have for your characters, the more rewarding the game is"
Excelblem: _aggresively sacrifices units for minimal gain_
Love truly takes all forms.
Embrace generics and reject real units
For minimal gain and content.
@@renren47618 Jitaro my beloved.
After Cain Coin ™© crashed, the only solution was the nuclear one.
Permanent Death has always been the biggest point of chaotic back and forth in my mind. I always want to have the threat and weight of permadeath present in my mind as it will pull me further into the game and underline what it means to me, but I am all too ready to reload saves. Maybe the inconvenience of resetting the game is the punishment i instinctively know i deserve for not adhering to my own convictions.
This is the huge reason why it's so difficult to convince someone who hasn't "taken the plunge" so to speak to try not reloading saves. It's just instinctual to want to have all your options open, and especially if you don't know what challenges are upcoming in the future. The difficulty permanent death faces is that it needs to convince people that characters are worth protecting, but also not worth wasting time on bringing back. Especially for a first play experience with a game, that balance may be impossible to ascertain if it is even there.
hi from a year later! i'm totally the same and i find that i love thinking about fire emblem as a puzzle game for that reason- i love playing the levels over and over to figure out how to make it through without losing more than one or two guys
@@ChrisTheFields Hey I know this is a year old but I'd like to chime in, the issue comes with a lot of us old veteran traditional RPG players, the future will kill you. I use my elixir and suddenly I need it for a later battle, so you save it without using it. Same terrible mindset with Fire Emblem, this character is scarce, its better to have them and not need them, then the opposite. Simply put I've been burned before with RPGs punishing me for playing like they wanted or using resources. Fire Emblem WANTING me to do one thing ain't gonna change that habit and your video highlights that its up in the air what philosophy they will take next, maybe I'll get replacements, maybe I'm screwed at the end game for letting too many units go to crits!
I think Final Fantasy Advance Tactics’ way of handling permanent death is the best, basically there were these specific areas that had no laws (laws were what’s stopping units from killing each other) so if your battle was in one of these areas you get more serious and stay more focused and when a character dies you kinda accept it, but when the entire game “has no laws” I tend to get kinda bored and not think too much about my moves which forces me to restart the entire chapter.
@@Munto-Z Even in FFTA you can get them back if you act fast enough as there's a 3 turn time limit before they are dead dead.
I think Valkirya Chronicles has done it right, a unit gets down and is unable to act, you have a chance to correct your mistake with them by rushing a unit to them and getting medic to save them, if though and enemy unit reaches them first they are done for, then it takes time before the unit is able to redeploy to the battle field.
I think FE needs to adopt something like this. Drop Permadeath as the main mode make it so that the unit is outta battle for X battles. Where X is like thier level/2 or something with it being a minium of 1 battle. This would be a great way to A make tatical choices mean something snice you can lose someone strong mid-battle still, but still have some drawback for losing the strong unit, AND it could be a good way to make players use other units in side battles. Of course there would need to be random battles, I think something ala Awakening would work, after every battle the map has a chance to spawn those undead things, you could also use an item to draw them out.
People were reloading to save characters way back in the first game. The thing is characters are not equal. Whether it's power discrepancy or just character design. People want to keep their cool characters. Anything short of making the units generic like in advance wars will make players want to save them.
I agree. I even curse if I loose a soldier as Nova in SC II CO-OP because they have names and her mechaniques make it possible to not loose anyone.
That is why in Ghost Recon they made in game 2 the made Scott Mitchell. Because where they thought in first game, they make generic characters where the player made the story, instead people did not care as except the specialist they got replacement anyway.
I could imagine people resetting when an advance wars infantry died and it looks and sounds hilarious
It also helps that in most games these characters are limited. You won’t be able to get more easily and some serve unique niches that cannot be replaced.
So, my first FE game was Radiant Dawn when I was like…11. Only played it cuz of the cute girl on the cover, knew absolutely nothing about what I was in store for. So, predictably, I SUCK, and I am basically losing units left and right during what feels like every chapter of the game. I have no strategy, I am essentially just bashing my head into a walk until the wall breaks and let’s me progress. By the time I beat it (don’t ask me how, I genuinely get confused trying to think about it), nearly the WHOLE army is dead. I only got the essential “these guys need to live for the plot” characters like Ike and Micaiah…and then there’s Nolan. This random ass dude who carried me from the beginning of the game somehow avoided ALL of my stupidity and stood alone amongst a field of corpses, the only survivor of this absolute nightmare. What a guy, and what a play through that was. Never touched the game since lmao
And yet you REMEMBER THAT PLAYTHROUGH!
Gigachad Nolan
Reminds me of the time I got once got Path of radiance. At the time, I had only known Fire Emblem through Smash Bros, so when I see Ike on the cover, I think, "Oh, this is Ike's game. Smash Bros told me about it. I bet it will be like the Legend of Zelda."
I played through the first few levels thinking, "ok, maybe the actual adventure game will start after I do these chess games" I proceeded to have everyone die and then returned the game.
This is one of my biggest gamer regrets, as now that I've grown to like strategy games, I wish gave Path of Radiance an honest try back then.
My first run of Awakening probably would've been just that if I hadn't played on casual. Even so, a lot of resets for Chrom and Robin to the point I had them just hiding behind Sully and Cordelia respectively the entire game, as I couldn't strategize to save my life at the time.
@@SolarBrain4128bro that game costs like 200 bucks now
I tried to iron man awakening once, and I got really invested in the little stories that cropped up naturally through the gameplay. Until during a child paralogue I got my entire army (aside from the characters that have to remain alive) killed. I spent the entire rest of the game with nothing but Chrom and Robin, mindlessly having them walk slowly towards the objective while hordes of enemies ran into the meat grinder. It wasn't fun.
But you'll remember this run for ever
@@scarocci7333 I mean I'll remember it, sure, but only the first half. I can't remember a single story beat or gameplay event from after you reach the second continent
@@dragonslibrary9207 that’s also just a big flaw with awakening in general. The experience system means that it’s always most optimal to just pour all of your resources into a single character.
@@dragonslibrary9207 That sounds like a really raw oneshot story.
I think permadeath on awakening is fine on normal, on any of the higher difficulties it begins to test my patience. On normal, it makes me actually pay attention and makes unlucky situations force me to reconsider how I should approach the game. Higher difficulty settings make me extremely annoyed with the ambush spawns and makes keeping my units properly leveled through cycling them in and out ineffective.
I feel like the major change is that each character now has narrative weight. Beyond an intro quest, characters now have actual feelings, stories, lives, families, loves. You’re no longer losing Tim, the powerful axeman who saved you on Map 7. You’re losing Gary, the kind, sweet hearted buffoon who slowly but surely began to date your white mage Grella after multiple years fighting together on the battlefield, who journeys with you in hopes that someday he’ll find his missing sister, etc etc.
The reason why games like Xcom, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, etc thrive with permadeath is that the narratives you construct are in your head. You may imagine Gary “Rumble Tumble” Johnson has an intricate story and lore, but at the end of the day he is never actually anything but a bundle of numbers. When he gets gunned down, you don’t “lose” any content. That’s it. That’s the real ending of his story. Whereas if Gary the axeman dies, you never actually learn what his story could have been.
With the shift from tactics to narrative RPG, Fire Emblem has shifted permadeath from a temporary strategic setback to a giant narrative failure. You lose all but one unit in Xcom, and that hurts but it’s a failure you can recover from. You lose all but one lord in Fire Emblem, that’s hours of interactions and narrative lost. And if you’re only playing the game one time (like most casual fans do) you’re not gonna accept missing that much.
imo the added story should be irrelevant. Yes, it is making more people reset, but the more important point from my perspective is that an ironman in newer games is not as viable of an option as in earlier titles.
3H is very much the most extreme example: every death is a monstrous blow which you have no options to recover from if you're past the timeskip.
The problem isn't the narrative, permadeath just doesn't work gameplay-wise anymore due to how modern FE is designed.
It’s definitely both for me. Mechanically in 3 houses you have less characters to recruit, they’re frontloaded, they require more investment to be useful and more completely fill a slot in your line up. Also for things like the children mechanic in awakening and fates your new characters were tied to keeping your old units alive.
But additionally what he was saying story wise: the support conversation, paralog chapters, dialogue you may get from them during cutscenes and home base conversations. You’re losing more than just the end credits card for them narratively now. Which is definitely not only a bigger percentage of the story but also a big reason why many new players interact with these characters in the first place.
Very well said. If IS is going to keep classic mode around (which I want them to), then I would like to see a game where the loss of a character is felt in the story. Taking your example, what if Gary dying unlocked a special mourning scene where Grella grieves for the loss her trusted ally and vows to keep moving forward to honor their sacrifice. If its significant enough, she could even gain a new skill to reflect how this big moment has affected her. What if even though Gary is dead, you still unlock his paralogue where you find his missing sister, but now instead of a happy reunion, the ending cutscene is a bitter-sweet of your lord explaining to the girl that her brother is dead and the teary-eyed girl pledging herself to your army to fight for the same cause as her brother. In this scenario, not only are you not losing out on story and game content, but you're actually unlocking a new unit with new supports that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This is what I'd want to see in a future Fire Emblem game, one where the story and characters react to a tragic death, giving you new or alternate content instead of just locking off content. Ideally, I'd love to play a game where everyone except the main character and lord can die certain characters dying can alter the way the story progresses (ex. a character you recruit in chapter X acts as your guide and helps you beat the villain to the plot Mcguffin in chapter X+4, but if they die before that, you don't stop the villain from getting the special Mcguffin, leading to a much harder battle in that chapter)
I genuinely care less about most modern characters in the last 3 new entries than even generics in like the shadow dragon remake. Since awakening they characters have been hard to enjoy.
@@MathMasterism The problem is then what was already said in the video, that the game starts to reward you for losing your soldiers. If you do this, then completionists and optimizers will just start killing off "Gary" for these extra buffs and characters and swap him out for "Chad, the better axe guy".
"Don't get caught up trying to get a perfect ending" is a hard pill to swallow for many gamers. Especially as we get older and have less time to dedicate towards these kinds of things. Speaking for myself, I have a huge backlog and I don't have time to replay stuff anymore so I want my experience with a game to have a good ending. The easiest way to avoid players wanting a perfect ending is to simply not include one. That's actually why I nearly despise Triangle Strategy.
In this case, you interpreted the quote too literally. There are only a few Fire Emblem games that even have additional endings beyond the standard ones. What Kaga was referring to being the "perfect ending" in context of the interview were the players too caught up making sure everyone survives at the end of the game.
Triangle Strategy does have a golden route though! And it's possible to get it on your first playthrough if you don't want to go through the other routes (but I don't think anyone would recommend it tbh)
@@KazuraiKoori I think what they're saying is that they don't like that Triangle Strategy has a perfect ending because they feel compelled to reach it, which effectively means they have to play with a guide in order to avoid replaying the game in full multiple times over.
Triangle strategy is the perfect strategy game
@@guy-sl3kr you need to get all the endings anyway, why buy a game and not fully complete it
_"Water of revival pours forth, but you have no need for it"_
Truly the line that encapsulates modern FE best.
I do want to admit, I have only played the “modern” FE games. And while I never enjoyed Classic mode for the main games, playing Cindered Shadows on Classic Hard was the most fun FE experience I had.
Like, obviously losing characters isn’t really viable on the play though, but figuring out how to complete every stage without losing anyone was surprisingly fun.
The divine pulse system feels incorporated pretty well too. It feels like extra life in shoot them ups, where it makes the game less unforgiving, while also makes it exciting when you spend 30 min finically near the end of the map, and you are all out of pulses.
Edit: forgiving -> unforgiving
I think a game that does this system well is Wildermyth. Instead of just "character dies" in battle, there are also options for another character to take the killing blow, the "dying" character takes an injury (that affects gameplay), the character goes out with a bang (massive damage to enemy), the character goes out inspiring others (bonus hp/armor for survivors), etc.
And further, the characters each have an age, and each section of the story is separated by 8-12 years, so characters that fall in love can have children that show up later in the gameplay. And further, characters can retire from old age, passing down experience to a newer character.
I think a game like that is the best way to evolve the "permanent character death" system while still allowing for good stories.
Same with Valkyria Chronicles 4. When your character fallen in the battlefield, it can either attack for the last time or inspiring the whole team.
Hell, not only that, but if I remember correctly (haven't played in a long while). The "Legend" system allows you to bring back said charecters (with an increased cost to recruit) to another adventure, so really its "semi-perma" death.
@@blazichaos7181 That's true, although the character's story and relationships are gone, so it still feels like that original version is truly dead.
What I think is holding back perma death in modern Fire Emblem is the fact that when a character dies, that death isn't acknowledged in the story past their death quote. In games like XCOM or early Fire Emblem you could get away with very little fanfair after a character death because in those games characters are mostly just stats. You can have a personal attachment to one of your XCOM soldiers because they made a 5% shot and saved a fellow soldier, but they don't have any backstory, personal drama, etc beyond your own head cannon.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses has some of the best written and 3-Dimensional characters in the series, but that just makes in it all the more lame when their mention in the story abruptly ends when they die. In most stories a major character death is meant to be a big thing that is felt by the audience, the characters, and potentially the narrative. In Fire Emblem, if Ignaz sees his best friend Raphael die right in front of him, not only does that lock you out of their supports, but Ignaz's character is not at all affected by the loss of his friend. As a final example of how modern Fire Emblem's stories doesn't support perma death, some characters can't even die when their health goes to zero because they need to appear in later cutscenes for story progression, so they just get taken off the roster and are never seen until the story needs them.
In a future Fire Emblem game, I would love to a see a kind of "Mourning System" in addition to the tradition Support System. If a unit in your army dies, you unlock a special scene where a character (or group of characters) that had a connection to dead unit mourn the loss of their ally and deal it in different ways. They could even receive special attributes afterward (for example if a character died to a recurring boss, maybe the unit with highest support level with them gets an attack bonus against that boss). This could help make the hole in your roster not hurt as much. I also would like to see a Fire Emblem game experiment with having one story route that branches based on decisions and what characters you've loss. Like what if a character you recruit in the early game is from a foreign land that you visit in the late game. If that character is still alive, then they will be an intermediary that smooths out relations with the people there, but if the character died before getting to this point the local are more hostile to you, leading to an extra battle, or maybe your army runs into the parents of the dead unit and your Lord will have to sadly explain that their child is dead.
TL;DR If Fire Emblem is going to continue making units with fleshed out backstories and a lot of story content, then they should make it so losing a unit doesn't just lock you out of content, but instead unlocks new/alternate content. That would give players a reason not to reset the game when a character dies.
If I remember correctly, Shadows of Valentia does have alternate character endings if certain characters are dead
The funniest part is that you don't need to make a special mourning scene, there's already a war end recap that tells what happens after, the dead characters only have "dude died lmao" instead of telling exactly what happened to their families and friends after their deaths.
@@XxLoonitickxX you make a good point. In hindsight I should have just said I want character deaths to unlock alternate content, that is to say content that serves the same purpose as the content you would get if a character were alive, but with its own unique context.
Like most people don’t say the different routes in 3H are locking off content to players because every route has the same amount of mechanics and different varieties of units, it’s just the context you interact with them that’s different.
As an example of what I want to see, imagine if you unlocked a unit’s paralouge regardless of whether they were alive or not. The context of the paralouge and how it ultimately resolves would change but you’d still get to experience the level and claim the rewards. As an example imagine Petra’s paralouge, but this time your going to Brigid to quell unrest as the Petra is dead and there is now a big succession crisis happening. This wouldn’t encourage people to intentionally kill Petra as it’s just a sadder version of her normal paralouge, but it would discourage reloading if Petra did die since you won’t get locked out of going to Brigid.
I think 3 houses characters are mid tbh. I mostly agree with your sentiment but the way routes work in 3 houses shallows the characters for me significantly. And some characters i straight up laugh when i kill on other routes. Were they written better i woudn't be feeling this way.
3 Houses murdered permadeath in a certain ways that are beyond character progression of others and narrative punishment: Unit investment (character on level 20 you saw grow from evel 5 who you spent so long seeing grow just dying to a random crit who otherwise is a powerhouse) for exampe of one, and another being you recruit nearly all characters at the exact same time and place. If you lose a character in a niche you had prepared, you won't be getting any repacement.
On my fe7 ironman run for example, my healer priscila died on one of last chapters but i pressed on. Why? Well, the same chapter Legault joined - a mysterious character that i usually pay no mind, became one of my mvps due to his high staff rank and even got A rank support with Lucius that i woudn't have considered otherwise, rewarding me due to limited supports for each character.
The problem with that would be that this means a exponential effort on the game dev with each additional character. It'll mean, by neccessity, a massively reduced rooster, which then again runs into the problem discussed in this video with game difficulty, where your run can become essentially doomed.
I dont think thats a viable route for Fire Emblem to take. But a new roguelike spin on the genre where losing is half the point of the game could possibly pull it off. But again, dont expect the 30+ well written characters Fire emblem enjoys.
I played FE3 Book One for the first time recently. I decided to iron man it. The personal experiences and stories that came from it was one of the most fun things I have ever done in a Fire Emblem game. Wendell dying to a 4% crit, Ogma getting Godly level ups, Navarre dying to a 2% crit, Merric cheating death multiple times, Jeorge dying to a 7% crit, Minerva dying due to missing a 96% attack, and Hardin dying to yet another crit (I didn't catch the number).
I still really enjoy modern Fire Emblem. In fact, Awakening is probably still my favorite entry in the series. It's just a shame that many games aren't built around iron manning as much as others.
It's amazing how much more I've remembered from small little moments like these. My first time playing Fates-Conquest, I was at the very end of a chapter, and Arthur was about to die. I was getting ready to just reset right there, but Arthur (the unluckiest character in Fates) managed to dodge an 80% hit against him. It was just one incredible moment that lasted for only 3 seconds, but it says volumes I still remember it more than 5 years later.
DND Campaigns have to address a lot of this same design space when dealing with character death. Because each table is run by its own game master, there's a ton of experimentation with various styles of RPG + Tactics Simulation, complete with dealing with consequences of lethal mistakes. Having a downed character in fire emblem type game bleed out for a few turns before really dying, during which time they might be healed and brought into the fight or at least stabilized, would be a great addition to the games
That would be great, but it would need some balancing to make it stick to the perma death part, like the character being unable to fight, be it for a few missions, or forever, so that you don't think because they can be saved, they should be thrown into harsh situations
I think one thing that got overlooked in your discussion of Classic vs. Casual mode is how playing Classic mode in a way where you reset after each fight, because you care about the characters or because you know you'll be punished for losing them, that still adds a degree of difficulty and strategy that is removed if you simply play on casual. On casual you can just throw your units blindly towards the enemy, particularly towards the end of the map, and if one of them dies, oh well. On Classic however, if doing that leads to someone dying, you end up having to replay the entire map over again to prevent that from happening (or just let it happen and not have that character anymore).
The real nail in the coffin for this is the Turnwheel mechanics, where even on Classic you can just rewind the turn a few times per map so a handful of dumb mistakes doesn't require a reset. But I think in a Fire Emblem game without the turnwheel, there's still a place for Classic as a means of forcing you to consider your movements and not accidentally put your precious units in danger, where on Casual mode you'd just be able to shrug off a mistake like that, complete the map, and still have your guy back.
This is what I was trying to convey at 21:37 although I guess I didn't do as good of a job expressing that as I thought. Alas, there's only so much time in a video and not enough nuance to go around. But I suppose that's what clarification in the comments is for. Even if permadeath in modern FE doesn't understand why it was included in the first place, players still have to engage with the mechanics and risk to a degree far greater than is required on Casual Mode. I'd still rather have Casual Mode be there than absent. But it should stand to reason that a game that is fun to play with the intended difficulty on Classic Mode will also translate to a fun Casual Mode experience, where that doesn't work the other way around. And I'm not completely against the Turnwheel either. It's simply too versatile and convenient to use in it's current state. I think it still has a place in Classic mode. But in order for that to truly be compatible, it needs to be a strategic consideration rather than the obvious decision.
It is hard to include permanent death when losing any characters means missing story, making the game harder, and losing what you have built up. Shadow dragon definitely seemed to be on to something though with those extra missions for different characters if you lose too many. The true solution to this problem might be for the game to take more divergent paths if characters start dying, like completely new missions and storyline, sometimes more expansive and interesting than saving everyone, maybe some character even change after seeing all of their friends die, maybe they get a boost as they try to be better so they never let their comrades die again. A game like that would make playing with perma death a lot more interesting as you truly will get a unique story. It would make the games a lot more complex though, and a lot harder to develop.
Counterpoint: with turnwheel, enemies can have "stories" through gameplay that are unforgettable due to the devs being able to do more with new mechanics. Anyone who got their whole blue lions team swept by Edelgard's raging storm on Maddening mode in a single, unending chain of carnage that is so unlike anything they've ever seen an enemy do, not in a scripted cutscene, but an actual map, will likely never forget that.
I know I won't.
I still remember screaming when she used my dodge tank Ingrid as a stepping stone to massacre my army. Never again.
The first time you meet the Black Knight in the Telius series and hear this music only he has. I think many players started with Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn, they'll know what i mean.
@@kheasboroki3928 that shit still frightens me. The moment he steps onto the map i go into a frenzy to get the hell out of there.
Even without the turnwheel you can still have these moments.
The dread when playing FE12's Chapter 8 and and watching the combat forecast say "0" as the enemies close in from all sides and you're just flat not supposed to fight them is something I won't forget easily. And besides, if Edelgard did that and actually killed four of your party members and made you reset, you'd probably be really pissed at the time, but you'd appreciate the game having the willingness to actually do that when looking back at it.
@@lefthandedscout9923 haha agreed and I'm really glad they did give edelgard something so powerful as an enemy. My point is the reset is inevitable though right? If by definition you were caught completely unaware by a map or character having something that strong that you couldn't have foreseen, turnwheel just saved you having to redo a whole map for the sake of an (admittedly fun) gotcha moment made by the devs.
Also someone else in this reply chain mentioned the black knight in PoR. It got me thinking that it also lets you be a lot more experimental with seeking potential dialogue options knowing that you don't have to run back the whole level. I'd imagine this is how most people make discoveries in older emulated games using save states?
The way I found out the permanent Death in FE was in 6, and it was shocking to say the least.
The Red cavalier Lost a battle and then he said something like "Sorry Roy, perhaps I can't continue from now on." and I was, oh he retired. Then the next chapter I was looking for him and then it hit me.
"They can Die..."
That run was brutal, I didn't recruit a lot of units, lost many of them and obviously I didn't get the true ending. For that reason I always reset a chapter if someone dies, Unless it's near the ending of that chapter and I can't do anything.
Also, in Valkyria Chronicles happened something similar. One of my Soldiers got down and I was going to get him but the enemy Reach him first. After the chapter I saw his name in the memorial menu. Geez... Great way to remind my bad strategy... Cool idea and concept of the war, but man it hurts.
In vallyria chronicles at least is easier to save people honestly if defeating them 1 time was enough to kill your units it would be stupid hard.
So there normally is not as a big Of a treath as in fe specially When the game lets you Save multiple times in a map
somdething i love about tellius and echoes that i wish was done in more fe games is that if a character dies after the battle you can see the effect it has on the other characters (tho i doubt anyone even knew it was in echoes when the turnwheel exists)
One thing that the series could do to make permadeath more relevant to the broader fanbase is expand on what Path of Radiance did with some of its supports by having the support change based on who has died (example being the Tormod and Sothe support if Muarim dies). Having dialogue change not just in supports, but also in story moments would do wonders for revitalizing a for the most part obsoleted mechanic by reinforcing the personal narrative of the player with long-term story ramifications alongside gameplay ones.
Partially relevant tangent:
I started playing FE with Sacred Stones back on the GBA, I've always played the series with the idea of each map being a puzzle, and death being the punishment for making a mistake on said puzzle, it's a mindset that enforces careful planning and disapproves kamikaze strats, that's why I still play on classic, since there's no easy way out of the puzzle. That same mentality has also resulted in a real habit of cranking up the difficulty (starting each new game on hard for a first playthrough), which has only highlighted how much worse difficulty balancing has gotten across the series since Path of Radiance's JP only maniac difficulty (which got heavily neutered and rebranded to "difficult" difficulty), with most games going for poorly thought out gimmicks and/or clearly not playtested enemy scaling (Awakening's Lunatic+ and 3 Houses' maddenening being the most egregious offenders) for their "very hard" and beyond options. Shadow Dragon and New Mystery's bevy of gradually increasing difficulty options, and Conquest's shockingly considered and well-done difficulty balancing do give me some hope, but since all of the well-done difficulty examples were more linear in their structure without side-content or grinding maps available to the player, I'm not too hopeful.
Also I really hope for IS to spread unit recruitment out more and keep mid-chapter recruitment, I sorely missed both in 3H, especially since unit bases and how you recruit them are such an important part in giving units distinct gameplay variety (especially since pre-promoted older/more experienced characters and enemy converts are such a key part of the series' identity to me).
It really feels like story fighting gameplay in one game. I feel like the "simulation" label fits more with the support system, and the SRPG fits the perma-death combat. It is hard to find a balance between x-com and advance wars vs (what I assume) final fantasy tactics does.
I will always play with classic mode on, except if I choose a higher difficulty I know I won't be able to beat on classic, or it would get really boring.
I personally think it's ok to reset since you get the punishment you should have. If you always reset, you can't progress until you manage to not get one of your units killed. I don't see it as reversing the outcome, more so "all right, I'll try again, that wasn't a good strategy".
I see it as falling in a pit in Mario. Do you respawn right after the pit? No, you go back to the beginning of the stage, s you try again, because you failed.
Well in fire emblem, if I messed up, I don't want to move on. I want to conquer that challenge. So just leaving units dead makes me feel like I'm missing something.
But of course, I always consider permadeath a choice. Sometimes, they will stay dead, if I don't feel like replaying a chapter.
also, great video. Made me realize some stuff about permadeath. Like fe7 encourages reset more than I thought.
Although no mention of Path of Radiance imo pretty much says "this game did it well", and oh boy it did. In path of radiance, I NEED to do an iron man run. Otherwise, I'll feel like I'm not using all my units. When they die, they have to be replaced, simple. They all have personalities, etc.
I'm not trying to argue that resetting a chapter to try new strategies isn't valid. But my point was more so that if everyone resets until every chapter is cleared perfectly, did anyone truly have a unique experience playing the game? The difference between Mario's Bottomless Pits and Fire Emblem's Death is that someone dying in Fire Emblem allows for that variance with outcomes. You could reset, but you could also keep going and shouldering the loss. The latter, I've grown to realize is just more interesting of an outcome.
PS. Me not mentioning Path of Radiance wasn't necessarily code for "this game did well". It's more that the game didn't make any substantial alterations for or against Permanent Death, and I just didn't want to make the video longer than it needed to be as this was about the ways it has changed. It's the same reason I didn't go far into FE3, 5, or 8 either.
@@ChrisTheFields ahhhh makes sense.
Yeah, I see your point why permadeath creates a new experience.
But that's why I think Iron Man runs are interesting. I was once doing an Iron Man run of Path of Radiance. I didn't go far though. I stopped by myself, not because of a game over.
I think experiencing your first playthrough with resets is perfectly fine, but I agree that retrying the game with an Iron Man run can be very interesting. Otherwise, you don't see the reason for new units that are weaker than your current ones. You're not SUPPOSED to use them, you're supposed to use them if your other units died. ANd I realize that the game Is fairly balanced that way. Notice how at the end of Path of Radiance, or almost any other FE game, your units are way stronger than the enemy? That's because you never had to replace them for inferior units, because of reset.
In fact, that's what convinced me to try an Iron Man run of Path of Radiance. I realized the game was balanced that way. I wanted to experience the loss of a unit and having to replace them with alternatives I didn't find good.
About the "having a unique experience playing the game". I totally understand, but I don't think someone just dying is enough. When someone dies, you only miss out on future content, nothing more. Sure, that's painful, but that's all. I wish you would get extra content if some of your units died. That might sound like fe11, but that's not what I mean at all. I'm not talking about an extra chapter or something. I'm talking about characters acknowledging deaths more than just immediately after. Something like this happens in Path of Radiance, where Muarim is mentioned in one of the support conversations and the dialogue is altered if he's dead. That's the kind of thing I want to see, but times 10.
Many characters have relationships between each other, and those could be reflected with their deaths. Maybe some characters would have a different dialogue in the story if their partner died for example. What if Rolf wasn't willing to listen to Ike if you let Boyd die? What if Rolf would hate Ike, and have base conversations with him. When a unit that had an incomplete support, why not have base conversations that allow them to say what they think about that person they were growing closer to dying? Now, if THAT was a thing in the game, I would ALWAYS do an Iron Man run. Because then it would feel like my own personal experience. But when all I get is Ike making a disappointed face after the chapter and no mention of the character again, what did I get different from someone who reset? It's the same thing, except they got more content than me. Sure, that would require a lot more dialogue, but it would be so much worth it. I wish I had more examples, but I don't. Some characters that are very impulsive could end up hating Ike for the next few chapters and get their biorythm lowered. While other more optimistic characters would say they can't give up now that they lost so much, and get their byorythm boosted. What if every character got an ark with base conversations if their partner died? Or just more dialogue that reflects their deaths. In fact, a way to make it more impactful would be to wait a random number of chapters before having the loss brought up. What if at one point you have a base conversation with, say... Mist. She mentions how she's still sad about Brom dying, 6 chapters after his death. Even though Mist had no supports with Brom, she still knew he was fighting for his family and thinking about them everyday with his little stones. Ike and Mist start talking about Brom for the base conversation.
Now THAT, would make it feel like a character really died. When someone dies in fire emblem, I always feel like it has no consequence in the story and characters, only in the gameplay. If this base conversation system was a thing, I'd feel like it had a big consequence in the characters. Plus, this could give more spotlight to characters who don't talk after their recruitment. It could be a character that had nothing to do with the dead unit, as long as they can give a reasonable reason why they would care about that character's death. Plus, you'd still learn about the unit you let die. You could have learned that stuff in a support conversation, but you learned about it in a base conversation instead.
So to recap, you got: extra conversations that are personalized to the units you let die, a unit is now gone but can be replaced by a future one that will be recruited, background for the character that died.
Or, you can keep the unit, get supports, and that's it.
I think a system like that would be SO MUCH better. NOW, I'd feel like I'm playing a personalized playthrough. But as it is now, I don't see the consequences of letting someone die beyond missing content.
Resetting isn't a choice the game gives you resetting has to be there because the console needs a failsafe and this is my problem with reset advocates🤦
@@jokx4409 this won't work because the elitists killer a character purposely to get another character
@@cringekid3993 when you suspend your game, the game lets you choose between "resume chapter", or "restart chapter".
Sure, it has to be there for when the lord dies, but still.
Speaking of lords, what do you do when they die? Do you end your playthrough right there? No of course not. Everyone KNOWS you're going to restart the chapter (unless you're doing a challenged run, and this is not what the topic is about at all). So yes, resetting IS part of the game. That doesn't mean it's intended to be used when a unit dies though. But you can do it.
And yes, sometimes, you'll get better characters later. That's not always the case though. If a unit is too important for your army, replacing isn't really a choice. And if you want to get a specific pairing for the lord at the end of the game, I'm not going to just let the game take that away from me.
It's a choice. Do you want to keep going, but have that unit stay dead, or lose all your progress in that chapter until now to attempt to keep that unit alive.
Believe it or not, this is an extremely well balanced system. In my very recent BInding Blade run, I let units that were useful die because I didn't think they were worth it. I didn't reset in hope that I'd get good units later on. But when a very important unit died, I couldn't let that go, and of course, I reset.
So yes, resetting is a choice the game gives you. Because you can reset without even resetting the console or the game for most titles. And both choices have ups and downs.
And besides, what does it matter to you? Play however you want, why do you try to force your mindset to other players?
How am I just finding this video?
The topic is interesting to think about. Personally, I have an issue with how inconsequential most deaths are in the games. Most of the time if a unit dies you get their death quote, and the ending card says "X fell at chapter Y." I'm not saying everybody needs a 5-minute cutscene when they die, but a few things changing in the story would be nice. A couple of examples the series has done: multiple different scenes can play out depending upon if certain characters stay alive, die, or are captured in Thracia chapter 5; a handful of support conversation in Path of Radiance change slightly if certain characters are dead or if done during certain parts of the game; a base conversation changes depending upon if a specific character is alive, in a specific army, or dead late into Radiant Dawn (my personal favorite example); the characters' reactions to loved ones dying after battle and their ending changes as well in Echoes.
Also I don't think that every game in the series needs to follow Kaga's philosophy. The irony of saying that with my pfp is not lost on me.
i remember Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume’s permadeath mechanic having a full death scene for every character in the game that would play after the map, but i think that game’s playable cast isn’t even 30 chars
X-Com did permadeath in a very tangible way, you didn't lose just units, you lost your headcanon for those units as well. Their history, what they were fighting for. Another great thing in Enemy Unknown is the philosophical questions around death and sacrifice, What are you willing to do for victory against an enemy that wishes you dead or enslaved? What are you willing to give up? your life? your body (Mec Troopers), your mind? (Psi) your very humanity? (genetic modification). Every part of EU screams sacrifice and the embrace of death for the cause of freedom. It's something I wished Three Houses would touch during the massive hypetrain of "Kill every last one of them". It didn't deliver tho.
More notably, you have near infinite replacements.
Every FE game has a limited cast, and players can only recruit so many characters- XCOM can generate as many as you need, so long as you don't blatantly game over.
I think i enjoy permadeath in games like XCOM more because the units are infinitely replaceable, but it also hurts much more to lose them since i made them, i gave them a backstory, a design, a personality, i got attached to these characters because i made them and saw them become stronger alongside me, and to then see them die is honestly fucking sad as shit.
I remember on time i lost my best sniper.
@@Hopper_Arts same
I mean drones are optimal in X-com 2.
Why bother with fragile humans?
I haven't played 3H so I don't know how it handled this, but-- something that I think you could have talked about that to me really defanged "permadeath" in FE13 and FE14, was... how many of them weren't actually deaths. Far too many are canonically just characters retreating from the battlefield. This has been a thing in older games already, because the plot can't go on without some of the more important characters who are also playable, eg Seth in FE8, but FE13 and FE14 REALLY got far too liberal with it. Like, really, no first gen female unit in FE13 can actually die? The kid units are already said to be from a parallel universe, not the future-- their moms dying wouldn't make a time paradox.
And I get that it would be extra writing to make the script work with missing characters, but to not even try? Oh no, X character pops into a few main campaign cutscenes, now they can't die. The abscence of characters in cutscenes if they died in your file is something really poignant to me. I've never done an Iron Man run, but I vividly remember practicing the chapter in FE9 where the Greil Mercenaries are fighting off that middle of the night attack on their base, and in one practice run Oscar and Boyd died, and I played it through to the end and checked out the cutscene. And they were just... Gone. They didn't speak up when the characters were talking about leaving, Greil didn't direct them on what to do to help pack up... The other characters didn't acknowledge the deaths-- the script wasn't complex enough for that-- but the silences were absolutely haunting.
You talked about every playthrough being unique with permadeath, and I think this is exactly what you're talking about. Such a huge chunk of the cast going "oh no, I must retreat to live another day, though I will never fight again" to make the plot exactly the same, just... takes a lot of that away. Every member of the Greil Mercenies has a big part of the plot in the beginning of FE9, and it would have been easier to give them all death passes to keep them in the script, but the fact that they can die and that the close-knit Mercenaries can get gaping holes in it really enriches the game.
Btw, this video is super well done, it's a crime that it doesn't have more views.
Thank you for the lengthy comment! The reason I didn't talk about how permadeath changes the story in context to what characters died is because... well, to be honest, I didn't think about it. My intended scope of the video was covering permadeath from the standpoint of a game mechanic.
But I love the point you talk about in regards to the acknowledgement of character deaths to sell the narrative even further. Something you might not have realized is that FE9 actually DOES acknowledge character deaths, depending on the context. I know for sure that if Oscar and Boyd die within Chapters 1 or 2, Ike will apologize to Titania for being careless. When Rolf eventually joins, his recruitment dialogue says he wants to avenge his brother's death, rather than just saying he can protect himself. I've heard that if a lot of people died over the course of the game, Ike's dialogue reads like he's become bitter from the war. Though this much I'm not well learned about. You're right in the sense that it's not deeply complex, but unfortunate souls would see these snippets of dialogue. Even then, it's the most dynamic example in the series. Although most games don't even attempt to.
The thing that makes it difficult to really encapsulate is that a solution is not as easy to pinpoint for how this could be implemented. This is something that Fire Emblem has always struggled with, even from the NES days. The easiest solution is for the playable characters to not be involved in the story. Though, most FE fans would not be down with that approach. You could replace characters like Seth with generic soldiers to say the intended dialogue as a stand in. But even then, what if those characters need to recite information that only Seth would know? Bottom line, a video game has too many factors of who can die when that a narrative would need to be designed around this consideration, and even theoretically that sounds like a logistical nightmare. And in my opinion, a game should be made with gameplay first.
Either way, thank you again for the comment. This line of questioning could be the seed for a greater discussion on this focus.
@@ChrisTheFields Whoa, I never knew FE9 actually acknowledges the deaths like that, that's awesome! I always reset for deaths and only saw this particular example because I was practicing a chapter and played through to the cutscene out of curiousity. I would love for FE to do more of that! Not writing a pathed script and keeping characters who appear in cutscenes alive is easiest, but you could do some incredible narrative stuff if you did, like Ike becoming more bitter is an amazing touch.
The gameplay vs story concern is a very good point-- some characters, like our example of Seth, would really change too much to feasibly permakill, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to try to write in deaths for EVERY character besides the lords/avatars. But some effort could be put into removing or replacing other characters who DO speak up past their recruitment chapter.
I actually looked up who gets a get-out-of-death-free pass in FE13 and FE14 instead of relying on my vague impression, and man, giving first gen women in Awakening and first gen men in Fates an automatic pass immediately knocks out half of the mandatory cast. After that, in Fates there's all the female royal siblings, Felicia, Rinkah, Gunter, Yukimura, and Scarlet. In Awakening, it's Frederick, the Feroxians, Say'ri, and... Virion? Some of these are very fair, the Fates royals are obviously crucial to the plot and Frederick would be a lot of work to replace, but the others, I dunno about some of them. You could probably have random soldiers share information these characters did in a lot of these cases. The sparing of Rinkah's life took place long before she was recruitable, and lol what did Virion even do after you recruited him that couldn't be cut or replaced?
Fates dads' immortality, btw, didn't make sense to me at first, because it's not like there's any potential time paradoxes. But then I realized that it's because they play such a large role in their childrens' recruitment chapters-- and that's probably the real reason the potential moms of Awakening can't die either. I think a potential workaround could have been giving patents *conditional* immortality-- if their child has been unlocked but has not yet been recruited, they merely retreat, but otherwise, chop chop they go. There's precedent somewhat-- nobody dies in Lyn's Story, but they can die in Eliwood's/Hector's. But if the writers had been willing to put in the time and work, I think child recruitment chapters where the main parent is dead could have made for some really moving scenes. Just imagine what it would have been like for the Awakening kids-- they finally made it to a world where their parent(s) should have still been alive, but instead, they were too late. And the Fates kids must have been waiting till the day they could join their parents in the main world instead of having just those occasional visits throughout their upbringings, but now their parent(s) are gone, and they'll never be able to. What missed opportunities from a writing standpoint!
Something else I thought of is that, if the script does acknowledge deaths or changes things-- most players wouldn't even see those changes, because I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of players, when one of their units dies, reset the game. But what would all players see? Their unit dying, and that character's heartbreaking last words.
You brought up that FE is classified as a simulation game in Japan, and that's really interesting to me when considering this aspect. Because your units in this war simulator aren't nameless, faceless soldiers. These aren't just military units, shrunken little faceless sprites. These are characters, with names and faces and stories, that the game gets you to know and love. And the game puts the lives of these characters in your hands. It makes you get attached to them, and then it makes you work to make sure they don't die. That's, I think, the real reason why almost everyone resets, and why it's so hard to keep going after a death. Not just for gameplay reasons, but emotional ones. You don't just want to keep them alive because you've invested your time and resources into them and don't want to have to play without them. You want to keep them alive because you love them. And if they die, it's your fault.
That, to me, is one thing that makes Fire Emblem stand out from any other game. It's always been a part of its heart. And I think a lot of that has been undermined, at least in the two post-mainstreamification FEs I've played. It's not because the game has become more accessable-- its increased accessability in "casual" mode is unrelated to the changes made in "classic" mode. The changes in permadeath from the non-gameplay standpoint are unnecessary, and feel like they're coming from a place of... not being willing to put in the work, and quite possibly, the changes in what the dev team considers to be "Fire Emblem-ness."
I would LOVE to see you explore this topic in a video, I'm sure you would have a really interesting analysis! I need to check out your other videos, I see you are a man of culture with those Golden Sun videos! (Though, I've never played Dark Dawn-- I got a copy at release but never got around to it...)
This video actually made me want to pick up my copies of all my FE games and finally beat em, I've only beaten FE13 and FE14 despite being into the series since they first came to the states almost 2 decades ago! Usually I go overboard with grinding and then get bored, lol. Maybe this time I'll finally do it!
I'm pretty sure every character in 3H, post time skip, actually dies. The death quotes in that game are absolutely heart wrenching
The reality is the opposite however, the characters either have to be "crippled" and "dead" for the sake of combat but still alive to keep the plot functional, or you get the one sided nature of their interactions from Path of Radiance where nobody ever interacts with each other _too_ directly because the game has to be written like a telltale game, once a character has the ability to die, they turn into a dead man walking. At best the writers can put a scene in the game that players that lost that character will just never see, but mostly the character will spend the rest of their time in the story dropping one liners that nobody even directly acknowledges. The reality is the older games set up "reminder" scenes to try and hit you in the feels when somebody is dead altering entire dialogue exchanges, but it's still just that, a quick exchange to remind you that YOU lost a unit.
I play Rimworld and I'm no stranger to losing characters I love, while I don't use the "ironman" modes in Rimworld in case something truly unfair happens (and when you have over 300 mods installed to rimworld this happens often enough to make ironman mode a liability) I usually don't reload a save just because I lost somebody. But the way the story is told there is just fundamentally different, being that the story is entirely emergent. I'm not opposed to "permadeath" when done right.
The problem with Fire Emblem is that there's no real story impact when you lose a character, but because there's a lack of generic units you can refill your roster with, there's a massive gameplay impact for losing them... which frankly is not a good impact. All the characters are either written to be easily dropped from the script, or they literally don't even die from the permadeath mechanic anyway, but the problem is you can end up in the "hero limp" near the end of the game when you enter the fight with some underleveled units carried by the characters that force a reset whenever they die. Eventually yeah, you can end up in a situation where it's impossible to beat the game because you lost too many units, and many entries into the series have a finite amount of XP leading to even more restrictive strategic decisions.
Essentially, despite my love for the games, Fire Emblem games are actually not very well designed games, we love them sure but they're honestly not great games. These are flagrant issues with the core design, perma death in most fire emblem games don't work, awakening had the ability to play through DLCs multiple times so you never ran out of encounters and the DLC also brought with it a LOAD of characters you could bring into battle. So you lose a character, that's fine go grab Micah and spend some time in the XP and Money grinding levels, overuse a weapon then go into the item DLC to get some replacements for the legendary weapons. It's funny how these "pay to win" DLCs really ended up making this game one of the better permadeath games, while simultaneously making half the roster unable to die in permadeath anyway so they can stick around for the story.
The reason why in awakening no girls can die is not because of the kids - the fathers of every child can die after recruitment and that counts.
The reason is because whoever Chrom marries basically becomes a secondary main character, appearing in several cutscenes that make no sense if they're not there. That being said, I really dislike Awakening's handling of this for the same reason as you, and wish it only applied after someone got to S with Chrom. That would be far less egregious.
Though on that subject, Awakening has a far worse example of this in my opinion; Virion, the archer you get at the start of the game, appears in one cutscene in Chapter 13, and this means he isn't allowed to die for the entire fucking game. Like, really? REALLY? And to make matters worse, because of all the rest of the stuff with Awakening, Virion is the straw that breaks the camel's back and ensures that out of the team you have in the prologue and Chapter 1, not even ONE of them can actually die for real.
I strongly believe that, if we remove permadeath, there still needs to be consequences if you lose a unit in battle. As a war game there needs to be stakes, otherwise why even use the board for combat?
I think that there should at least be a strike system. If you lose a unit they come back the next chapter with lowered max health and weakened stats. If you do it again they get benched for the rest of the game. Perhaps in the story too your reputation as a tactician begins to plummet around others if you are careless in combat. There just needs to be some form of punishment in place so that players aren't just exploiting the fact that their units will come back just fine later and get careless in battle. My biggest fear with removing permadeath is that the combat will go from an engaging, strategic chess game where every move counts to just blindly throwing around action figures and praying for the best.
The question is, will it be optional and some people use it. Or force it and we go back to the old, something didnt go as i wanted, i reload. I enjoy permadeath but i have to admit, if i liked a character i reloaded my saves when they died. So it would need a lot of player will to not fall back to the reloading save tactic when it didnt went as wanted.
@@TheFjne I think I'm fine with still having the option to do a mode without this. Maybe have three difficulties Classic, Phoenix, and this idea I'm pitching which would be the default. Something that still punishes you if you're careless on the battlefield, but not as harsh as immediate permadeath. Instead of losing your unit forever the first time their health reaches zero you just get a slap on the wrist and a warning. Then the second or third time you let them die, which is when I think you should be able to know better, *then* they're out of the game for good.
They can still come up in cutscenes. Basically it'd be like in the classic games where some units are implied to just be out of the fight because they were hurt so badly from the chapter where they "died". Or maybe there's just a cutscene of them getting fed up with you mistreating them on the battlefield and quitting outright. Only taking part in story cutscenes outside of combat. There's a lot you could really play around with here.
I've played a game like that. I think it was called Rondo of Swords. You lost a unit? They were injured the entire next map. Reduced stats, couldn't go on side quests to class change/shopping missions, etc. They basically were force benched. They wouldn't die if you deployed them injured, but the penalty made battles so much harder, you were likely to injure other units keeping them alive. The only perma-death in the game was optional and caused a split path, but the only reason to ever choose it (IMO) was to see the other plotline once and never again because you give up such a powerful unit to get it (it was also the evil route, now that I think about it)
If permadeath is removed, you just need to make the game harder overall to compensate for allowing people to die.
Triangle Strategy allows your units to die, but enemy units are actually a decent threat and take multiple hits to kill and none of your own units are stupidly OP. In Triangle Strategy, if you tried doing something like throwing the Dimitri/Byleth equivalent into a 1v3, they’d get annihilated. So when you lose a unit during battle, it really hurts because you were dealt a heavy blow to your strategy (losing a crucial healer, DPS, a tank, etc) and the enemy numbers can snowball and overwhelm the rest of your army.
@@NerdMiGerd yeah but what if one of your characters dies because the enemy got a lucky 1% critical hit? Am I suppose to punished for that? even after i made sure to not have anyone die off?
See, I never minded resetting the game, I always felt it added to the challenge. I've been playing since 7 came out in the US, and what I think spoiled the heart of the series isn't casual mode, it's the ability to grind endlessly. Exp used to be a finite resource, now you can steamroll through entire chapters with an extra hour or two of killing bandits.
I have to admit that even though I'm an older gamer I started Fire Emblem with Awakening and my sole condition for buying was upon knowing I had the option to "turn off" the permadeath. I can't state how much I despise it.
Now, after that I have played some games in the series with permadeath and they were fun but getting the 1% critical right in your favorite character doesn't help the cause.
Another nice thing about being able to opt out of permadeath is that like this I can still play on harder difficulties without the fear of soft locking myself.
this is one of the best essays on fire emblem's permanent death I've seen
i would like to add though path of radiance has large dialogue changes depending on who lives or dies. if oscar and boyd die before that mission where you rescue mist and rolf then you see mist say how she knows she's safe because her brother is coming, rolf in response cries about his brothers' deaths and mist comforts him. brilliant incorporation of gameplay to narrative
It's sad how the game that literally handled the storytelling best still has plenty of examples of how the permadeath stilts the character usage.
They can have a couple "moments" like that to drive home when characters are dead, but the reality is Oscar and Boyd being capable of dying means that they can't really be alive in the plot either. They can't do or say ANYTHING that moves the plot forward leaving to them being "dead men walking" where they can't really do or say anything of importance because they might be dead.
Of course the gameplay of Path of Radiance is also one of the worst games to lose a unit, with finite XP and units, losing those two could be RIP for the run.
@@SherrifOfNottingham I think that was going to be the purpose of Supports before it got changed. FE9's Supports do a whole lot in backending character progression and sometimes weaving it in with the main plot. It's not the best or anything, but I do think it was the great way to get both story and permadeath.
So Oscar and Boyd don't need to be plot-important to be lovable and interesting characters. In fact, I think the characters being plot-important is helping ruin permadeath. What a lot of characters need to be is MC(s)-important. Where they have an impact on the MC(s)'s character development or any other important character's development. And some characters can have impacts on other units developing.
starting out this series, i had a pretty strong aversion to permadeath. hell, my first ever Fire Emblem playthrough was Fates Birthright on _Phoenix._ then, when i went back and played the GBA games, i realized that i was actually having more fun with the intensity of knowing that one bad move could remove a character forever.
during my first playthrough of fe3h (specifically on silver snow) the only character i lost was shamir, because there was nothing i could have done at that point to save her. and god, that was rough, even for a side character. with a roster so small and all of the value she provided now gone, i couldn't really fill the gap left behind within a realistic time frame. as much fun as permadeath can be in terms of strategy, im glad 3 houses made a way around it with how intensive character building is.
FE3H was really, really not built for permadeath. I’ve played through it almost 5 times now and this run I lost Caspar. He still shows up in the monastery to taunt me that he’s still alive despite not appearing in any cutscenes.
@@sallywong5788 I find it hilarious the characters are still there talking, for some reason. It really does make it feel less impactful, though. I do like how they have a greyed out epilogue chapter, though.
@@sallywong5788 My head cannon is that they're ghosts.
I think they disappear in the second half of the game.
@@lizagarnet7529 Yeah. They also get a short sentence in the ending explaining what happened to them post-timeskip. Usually they die, disappear, get married (with some unhappy implications), or otherwise are away from the fighting.
For me it was Raphael, but it was fairly early on and I had barely interacted with him, so I just convinced myself he wasn't worth going back for. I still feel awful about it
What an incredibly written, storied, and edited video. I love this series and this topic has always been a point of contention for new, but I never was able to put my finger on it. Thank you for this
I think one game that does the death mechanic extremely well is the Tactics Ogre series, namely the "Let Us Cling Together" title. Instead of units croaking immediately upon losing their HP, you have a set amount of turns to revive them (or until they revive on their own, depending on the type of unit that just died). And even if you don't manage to revive them in time, they vanish from the battlefield and are placed back in your army. *However,* unlike Casual Mode from the more recent FE titles, LUCT handles death by giving every character 3 hearts and every time a character dies on the battlefield, they lose a heart once the battle is over. Once all 3 hearts are depleted, the character will then die.
I personally think this death mechanic allows for players to have less incentive to simply restart their game once their unit dies, knowing that their unit will still be alive after the battle ends, albeit the penalty isn't exactly large but at least it gives you an incentive to not be so risky with your strategy if your units have been dying too often while also not being too headstrong on the perfect victory without any deaths.
The game also features a rewind system, which many players in all turn-based strategy games are strongly against but, if anything, LUCT keeps track of which battles you have won with and without using the rewind system. So you can still feel accomplished knowing you've won some of your toughest battles without having to rely on a crutch, but casual players who don't necessarily care much for perfect records can safely rewind time in case of a mistake on their part. Also, while the rewind feature is unlimited, you can only rewind back up to 50 unit turns taken which also counts the enemy units' turns.
If FE could implement something similar in regards to perma death and rewinding, I think a lot more of the playerbase would be satisfied.
A very well argued and reasonable video.
Personally, whatever they do next, whether Permanent Death continues or is removed, I just want them to commit, and make a game that knlws what it wants to be. Awakening and Three Houses are held back by trying to have Permanent Death when the games really aren't built around it.
That's exactly why I said the potential removal of Classic Mode would be controversial, but potentially beneficial. I don't know if Intelligent Systems will ever be brave enough to make that call, as it would be completely taking out something linked to the identity of the series for over 30 years. But I would actually be willing to entertain what a "Casual Mode Only" Fire Emblem game looks like, as it could allow for some interesting shake ups, even if only for just one new experimental entry.
It would be really simple for them to just design without casual and turnwheel in mind. Make the game expecting players to lose units. That way the turnwheel isn't basically mandatory. We have seen what designing a game without permadeath is like and many aspects of gameplay suffer. I don't think they should commit to casual either because there are plenty of other games without permadeath that people can play.
As someone who has only tried a handful of Fire Emblem games (All three Fates, Echoes, Awakening, Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, Three Houses) and has actively disliked all of them except Three Houses, I think removing permadeath would be a horrible idea and kill my interest in any future games.
Losing a unit in Three Houses is so crippling that you'll pretty much always want to restart but I don't think that defeats the point of permadeath. Having to restart is still punishment and even knowing you're going to do it if you fail, it encourages you to play much smarter and more tactically, thinking carefully about your moves so you can avoid having to do that. And for the times an enemy gets a dumb 1% crit or your unit misses a 98% hit, I think Divine Pulse is a great solution, though I wish they'd limit the amount of pulses you could get more like in Cindered Shadows.
I'm currently doing a Maddening Classic run of Crimson Flower and I restart if I lose my Divine Pulses and then lose a unit. Yet I'm still having an absolute blast. It just wouldn't be as fun or satisfying without Permadeath having that threat of needing to restart and start from 0 and it's made me a much better player than Maddening Casual would have. At this point I don't think I could even go back to Normal or Hard because of how boringly easy it is by comparison lol.
@@zyvan3179 This. The devs should design the gameplay without considering the mechanics that negate permadeath's impact as well as give us an option to disable them should we so wish.
23:36 Hi, hello, yes, I'm basically one of those people. The only game with mandatory permadeath I've enjoyed is Darkest Dungeon, and even with that I didn't like it until recently. What changed is that my friends wanted to do a blitz through the game, of which I had only played 12 in-game weeks before, and we had to choose each others' team compositions and run them until we couldn't anymore. I'm currently sitting on 3 teams I cycle between, with some throwaway units I had to use because one of my friends decided my team against the Necromancer would include one unit from each of two of my teams, throwing my balance off entirely.
So what makes me enjoy Darkest Dungeon's permadeath? Well, aside from the fact that I can't do anything about it, it's honestly not all that impactful. You get so many new units all the time, and everyone is so close to the same power level to begin with, and you can just spend gold to add any skills you want the unit to use. It's honestly really difficult to care about any particular unit. In fact, it's really easy to start hating particular units instead; Reynauld, the starting Crusader, was a kleptomaniac and kept stealing shit, but I couldn't get him to die in combat, so I just released him. Training up new units can end up being cheaper than maintaining your current units, too. Oh, and when a character does die, sometimes you can find their head as an equippable item that has mega stats on it, so it can be super beneficial to just let them die. Finally, from a thematic angle, you're not one of the mercenaries, you're an aloof estate owner trying to reclaim your rightful inheritance with cheap labor. Why should you care about their lives?
Compare this to even XCOM 2, the only one in the series I've played. This game also has faceless units, but these units are far more significant because they need to level up to start accessing their specific skills, which means they have to go into combat at their weakest. The game doesn't lighten up because you have weak units, whereas in DD you can just do lower-level dungeons very easily. So any unit loss is not only a huge loss of investment, but it's also significantly weakening your squadron not only for the current mission but also in the future, as you get new recruits who can't handle the war. In this environment, I'd much rather restart the chapter than risk my entire squad getting killed next chapter from a rookie not being able to do their job.
Now look at Fire Emblem. Not only do your characters get better stats and access to better weapons over time, but they also have personalities, hopes and dreams. They're actual characters, nearly all of them. And when they die, you're not only losing that mechanical investment, you're also losing that emotional one. If I get attached to a character, I'm not going to let them die, it's that simple.
So why, then, do I play Fire Emblem in Classic Mode instead of Casual? And bear in mind, Awakening was my first title, so it was always a choice for me. Well, two reasons. First, I want the reminder that I need to restart. The death dialogue is a lot darker than the retreat dialogue, and that's a poignant kick to restart. The second is that Casual mode is still a huge punishment because dead units can't earn XP, which makes them weaker for the coming battles. It's not as harsh of a punishment as permadeath, but it's still something I want to avoid at all costs. I mean, who wants their army to be weak? This is also why I will be resetting in any games that use any sort of "alternative permadeath" mechanic. I don't care that Jerome the Cat Wizard is going to still be alive at the end of the battle, the grave wound he got is cutting his damage by 30%, that could be the difference between a successful clear and a full party wipe. I'm resetting to find a better course of action.
Basically, in order for permadeath to be a mechanic I actually like seeing, the punishment needs to be minimal. It's why Roguelikes are my favorite game genre; win or lose, you have to start a new run from the beginning, so who cares if you die? Darkest Dungeon is the same way. The units' class is what matters most anyway, so who cares if your Vestal dies? You've probably got 3 or 4 more in reserve anyway, plus 2 coming in on the stagecoach this week. But when the punishment for losing a unit is more severe, it sets up a negative feedback loop of the game getting continually harder as the punishment makes you more likely to fail, so you're more likely to get more punishments that make you more likely to fail again.
You just perfectly described my experience with ALL of these games. The only difference is that I don't think the punishment being minimal is the right choice for the game, but unfortunately, I have so many games I want to play, stuff I want to watch, and work I got to do, that I can't allow myself to play a game that punishes me to a point where I might have to play the whole game again, be it for different endings or the literal game over that XCOM has. I wish I had the time and patience to play FE7 with no resets, but I don't.
The moment Reynauld the insane cleptamiac died I felt It, maybe I get easily atached by graphics and numbers, but seing the hunter withouth his insane Knight friend was sad
@@keyman245 Oh, Dismas didn't survive all that much longer. I don't remember exactly when he died, but he was the first. I have his head now, it's a fantastic item.
@@abderianagelast7868 In my run I preserved my firts team like family, always together, the only one that died was the Knight
I think you encapsulated the difference between different types of games with permadeath.
-Disposable, no unit is significantly different from others and losses are replaceable.
-Technically/tactically valuable, a character is either more powerful than others or effectively irreplaceable. The loss of a character makes the game harder looking forward. It may achieve this by costing the player in-game abilities and/or resources or out of game resources like time.
-Emotionally valuable, as players develop emotional connections with characters they are compelled into taking better care of their units.
Your analysis of the shift from 6 to 7 is excellent, highlighting many notes I had myself -- accessibility of new units is a totally Japan thing that never came to the US.
I think the Elibe games may also hide the answer to the question, as well: the hidden-values path exclusivity of certain paths. The replacement-unit system of the DS FE1 remake doesn't work so well because the original content is all old stuff, but I think locking some characters behind death-gates or Classic mode or various other esoteric hidden values that the public won't necessarily know on release day is an option.
5:40
You could play the map regularly,
OR YOU COULD JUST USE THE WARP STAFF
Permanent death could be improved maybe if instead of introducing replacement units, the enemy unit that kills the player unit becomes a named antagonist with a prepared story for when the specific player unit becomes killed.
It would be a considerable amount of depth to consider, so maybe a handful of specific characters with storied antagonists and then some that are written with generic purpose based on a number of units dying.
Sounds like you need to check out Wildermyth. Turnbased tactics with a pretty cool take on permadeath. The first time your unit falls in battle, you can choose to have them survive the battle at the expense of taking a permanent injury that will affect their combat and story, or you can have them go out in a blaze of glory, doing one huge final attack. This, combined with the procedurally generated storytelling, make losing a character in combat a memorable story beat instead of a reason to reset.
Highly recommend this game to any FE fans out there. Or just any fans of tactics games in general.
But can you reset the combat encounter? Or will I have to start a new game every time one of my units dies?
@@abderianagelast7868 this question doesn't make sense in the context of how Wildermyth works... Check out a review
In a series where Lunatic Plus exists I have a hard time believing permadeath can be good design at the same time.
I don't mind that the series has gone more into the rpg side of it, but if it will, what I think the series should do is go all in on units being downed being inevitable and likely to lead to a loss if you're too careless early on, along with said unit no longer being able to get exp on that map, even if they won't be gone anymore next map.
Awakening feels like the first FE that didn't care about permadeath at all when its gameplay was designed.
If they do want to go into this direction of the franchise while keeping itself unique with classic mode, there needs to be an incentive to keep going even with the mistakes you have made.
For example, the support system in FE7 could make support bonuses permanent (but less potent) on a character if the one they are linked to is dead. Combined with the limited number of supports the games have it can make for some interesting gameplay to not only incentivise supports, but to do it as a way to have a fallback when making mistakes. Lorewise it can be that they are charging onto the battlefield with their own might and the might of their lost loved ones. (However, with the current ones having infinite supports avaliable this kind of system falls apart immediately, so idk)
Dang, you did a fantastic job man! It was fascinating to learn about each game's implementation. Love it.
I've only played some of Radiant Dawn and Awakening, but you're totally right that the games encourage keeping everyone alive. Just from a gameplay perspective of losing certain units and not wanting to continue without them, let alone also from a story perspective. I like the challenge of keeping everyone alive, and if that means there's not only challenge involved but I also get to keep my favorite characters alive, why wouldn't I? It's weird 'cause there should be some amount of player attachment to make their death meaningful, but then the attachment could mean the player would rather retry the entire level or honestly even quit the game entirely, which sounds silly but I guess you could consider that character's death to feel more like the death of your journey so you have to retry from the beginning rather than continue on. As long as the death feels fair of course, which is difficult to balance in the first place. I like the idea of feeling the losses you accrue but how disconnected do I have to feel from the characters for me to be fine with continuing on? I don't know, clearly you've thought about this more than I have haha.
Yeah I think this is accurate to me. If I know a character can die I’m less likely to get attached.
I do miss that in older games you get so many characters that if you lose someone, you can just keep playing without it being a huge loss. Yeah it felt bad, but it also helped the pacing a lot. FE4 became a lot more fun when I just kept playing despite losing a character. I will miss Lex, but damn, I didn't feel like backing up a save.
Permadeath has always been a point of contention for me.
As one of the newcomers from FE:A, the concept of letting some characters die never sat well with me. But at the same time, the threat of losing characters and therefore thinking twice or thrice over each decision I make as well as agonizing between restarting the chapter or continuing on is something that I love about these games.
This video put my thoughts into perspective and I can now see why I always hated permadeath while *still* playing the game on classic mode even in games that have casual mode.
I'm of the opinion that a lot of players are basically playing Casual mode with extra steps, whether it be through save states or resetting for anyone that dies no matter how far you get. This is why I feel that Casual mode makes sense. The way a lot of people play Fire Emblem pretty much caused the addition of it. I think that's also what's led to FE games being designed with ever shrinking rosters and basically making them parties of like 10-20 that you gotta hunker down with.
Yeah Casual mode to me is more for my convenience than anything, I just don't like how rng can make you reset a chapter to save a unit. The characters are probably one of the biggest appeals of the games so I want to keep them alive because I want to learn more about them
I wish permadeath effected the story in someway, it can be jarring when a unit dies only for them to still appear in the story or for no one to care. Adding extra scenes with character morning deaths, being swayed by deaths and having replacements for characters who appear on the story would make death feel more real and integrated into the world.
If the lord's sister dies I want him to regularly bring it up even as motivation to end the war, if a supporting prince/princess dies have other neighboring rulers be wary of joining because "the prince of the green nation supported you and now they're dead" heck even have a chance for the king/queen of the nation who's prince/princess died betray you and cause extra units and bosses to appear in future battles.
I'd even like to see death effect chapters i.e. imagine you have a scout character who regularly informs the lord what's ahead but they die and so now maps start with a fog of war effect until you recruit a new scout.
Personally I think they could do something of a mix between Valkyria Chronicles and that new game you mentioned.
Instead of outright dying, they are knocked down. You need to send a unit over to call a medic to have them evacuated from the battlefield. If you don’t make it in time you lose the character, if you fail then the character is lost. If they are evacuated from being brought to zero then they suffer stat loss when deployed for a couple chapters.
With this system it covers a number of things. 1: you have to use precious movement to decide if you want to risk saving the unit or if you want to better position or deal with an enemy. 2: you have a chance to save a unit if they fall but are not outright punished if they do. 3: getting knocked to zero still impacts them by lowering their stats, but you can use them in later missions by letting them “heal up”, so you’re punished for them falling but still eventually able to use them again.
13:13 ehhhhh I disagree. While the game does give you a ton of units, the problem is that pretty much all the mid-late game prepremotes(with the exception of Sirius) sucked and had embarrassingly low stats. On higher difficulties especially this would encourage players to keep all their early game units and keep them alive until the end of the game as any of those prepremotes you got later would be far to weak to handle the brutal enemies of the lunatic and lunatic reverse difficulties.
yeah, one of the big things that demonstrate how the newer games aren't built around permadeath is that the recruitable characters are very frontloaded, require a bunch of training, and few units you get later just aren't up to snuff. I mean, compare units like Say'ri and Alois to units like Niime or FE3 Samson
@@DuelingShade I mean in all fairness those late game characters aren’t for filling up the entire roster of dead units. They’re just meant to allow you to progress and win. That’s why you get an overpowered unit in the final maps for so many of the older games. Those units are meant to allow you a fighting chance. They aren’t guaranteed going to replace a unit that was trained, but they should be able to do damage and allow for a comeback. All those units you listed still have their uses and places even if they aren’t killing machines like a fully trained Dimitri, FE7 Marcus, Perceval, Athos, etc. It’s definitely hard to switch to using units mostly to gang up on enemies instead of one or two clearly a hallway alone, but it’s always possible because of those late game units
@@anthonynguyen1289 Yup that's pretty much what i meant, and why I brought up units like Niime rather than Perceval. Sure, units like Niime, Echidna and Douglas won't compare to a trained Raigh, Deke, or Bors, but they can at least take the spot, and they join right before you'll need their respective abilities. Compare that to conquest, if you lose one of your dark mages in chapter 13 or something, who's gonna take their spot? The one you didn't use that's still at level 9, a reclassed unit with E-rank tomes, or will you wait until chapter 23 and spend your dragon points to upgrade your hotspring to level 3 to get Izana? It genuinely seems like the game expects you to grind, or just not play classic.
@@DuelingShade oh yeah I get what you were saying. I honestly didn’t replay any of the 3ds ones so I never noticed. I think three houses while having horrible balancing did make recruiting those units very late game sorta worth it stat wise while they would lose the utility of a bunch of different class skills. So it did it in an interesting way where you could recruit them early to have them learn lots of different skills or hold off in case you need them to replace a high level unit dying randomly. I recruited Catherine super late and she was definitely serviceable. Most of the church cast have really useful utility even without class skills like Manuela warp or Shamir good arts
I think Three Houses actually touched on a brilliant possibility, by having you select 1/3 of the playable characters, have to work really hard to get more, and then have to kill every one of them that you didn't pick. After those characters die, their old friends and connections in your party always have things to say. Some are in mourning. And I think that's a huge breakthrough waiting to happen.
I think the series evolving into more of an RPG, where you don't want to miss out on any story by losing characters, makes the idea of permadeath hard. BUT... imagine if the writers made a huge slew of story that would flow from character deaths. Even gameplay elements. Imagine if every time you lost a character, their Support-bonded characters would have extra dialogue or even paralogue battles where they sought solace or revenge. They could learn from their mistakes with the Shadow Dragon remake and not lock entire characters behind this, while really branching out into making a character's death feel like it's _part_ of the story, not a _flaw_ in it.
Let characters build monuments to the fallen, and visit their graves. Let them retain tokens that remind them of their fallen loved ones, which grant bonuses in battle. Heck, get all sorts of wacky and let them speak with their ghosts or something, build an entire game-defining mechanic around it, idc. All I'm saying is that, if a character perma-dies and the player is able to say, "Well, at least now I can do XYZ, I wonder what that'll look like?", then I think permadeath could evolve back into the series in an amazing way.
Honestly permadeath felt better on the gba games (haven't played FE6) when I didn't feel obligated to reset unless I had to. I believe this is because of how the supports just feel like they were there just for your to grind support rank at the end of every map so I didn't do it. Yet fe16 makes death feel much worse as if I need to use divine pulse each time my brain shuts down. I've tried ironmanning hard 5 shadow dragon (ignoring the replacement characters if possible) and died from critting an enemy ruining my chokepoint. Permadeath may not be as meaningful but perhaps the option to reset is just better off. Casual mode can technically be classic but classic can't be casual.
I belive the idea of Kaga making our own story is strongly bond to the lvl up system based on RNG. On some of you "run" "save files" some character that are bad units can become good because of lucky lvl ups and became legends for one story. I think this is particulary true in Iron Man run were you must use some character to replace the dead ones. Mangs Iron Man on FE6 show that with Lot became a true hero while overall he is pretty bad. This create very personnal story. (sorry for bad english)
I'm okay with the concept of permadeath in a tactical strategy but I never liked FE's way of implementing it. I was more fond of Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyria Chronicles method of characters going down with life-threatening wounds, and you had to make a tactical choice to try and save them within the 3-turn counter before they died for real. VC also had the detail that enemy troops could move in to finish off your wounded.
Honestly classic mode allowed me as a 13 year old girl to get into fire emblem. I've still tried classic mode before but I just love the characters so I'm more likely to just reset anyways, hell I've really only used it to lose characters I absolutely hate (blue and pink haired crazy lady in fates for example)
I like that it's an option to have permadeath but in a very story focused game losing your characters just is awful
It’s incredibly based to play classic mode just to kill characters you don’t like.
People seem to have forgotten Wars, the OG simulation game. It last appeared on the DS with an entirely unique cast for a reason - Intelligent systems have no clue how to make a story without characters, and the time of games without stories where stories can be injected was 40 years ago. Wars as a series had died simply because fighting simulation was in a completely reasonable decline which only made sense to me when I picked up Shadow Dragon.
My first FE was Blazing Blade and it had me insanely hooked to the story. I instantly fell in love with Lyn, Eliwood, Dorcas, Ninian, Matthew... it had me come back every day to see what's going to happen next. What atrocities will Nergal commit? How difficult will my gulps feel while sailing towards the Dread Isle, infamous for "devouring" anyone who enters? It's all making me play the game because I want to see what comes next, and that is all achieved because I care about the characters. I want to know what will happen to them next.
Let's get back to the Shadow dragon. That was the next game on my bucket list after I finished GBA games since I only have handhelds. I started it, played through about half of the game and... I couldn't keep going. It's been months between each play session and I needed more than half a year to forcibly complete it. I don't think I'm ever coming back to that one, and that's coming from a player that has 100% of supports in 7 and 8. Simulation games don't make me feel anything. I don't want to play them because it feels like there's nothing to them. IS knows this, so they scrapped Wars and shifted Fire emblem towards an RPG. It's a shame to lose one of my favourite franchises to a shift in gaming industry, but at least Fire Emblem was saved and repurposed, and honestly feels better than it used to be, which is what everything strives towards anyway. I'm not very invested in the community, but I assume this one is similar to every other one, from Windows OS to Pokemon, in a way that people hate new things for the sake of not being 1:1 like the old ones so they probably disagree with me. But I absolutely wouldn't have been here if 7 wasn't a masterpiece story-wise, if I didn't care about its cast. If 7 was a simulation game, I would have dropped it before the end of it.
14:20 this actually happened to me when I first played Awakening. I never played an FE game before, so I thought "perma" death wasn't so "perma"... and yeah, by Chapter 5, I only had Chrom, Robin, Frederick, Panne, and Gaius before finally calling it quits and restarting from scratch. I still lost Panne, and was mad as hell when I realized how the child mechanic worked.
"There are people who are more interested in the support system." Hey look. I'm suddenly in the video
FE4 Players: Yay for Battle Save! Now we don't have to worry about our guys being killed.
FE4: *LAUGHS IN ARVIS*
I enjoy the permadeath mechanic. It helps me to pay attention due to my actions having real consequences. That said Awakening forward have leaned heavily into the waifu side of things so people are less likely to just accept that they have to live with the consequences of their orders.
Agreed, for me personally I find the main protagonists the hottest so I don’t really suffer from that. I mainly suffer from the lack of viable replacement units, the only option available is to train my level five Ricken in chapter 18.
Maybe a good alternative to classic mode for future games is just to make any death a lose condition. That's how many people play anyway, and it keeps that extra challenge without causing problems down the line
This really isn't the improvement you think it is.
Having an *_Enforced Permadeath Mode_* (the game constantly overwrites your save file, and if your lord dies, the save file gets deleted) would be an interesting and ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BRUTAL thing to see in a new Fire Emblem game, and I'd love to have that option available.
So I enforce it myself and as a result I haven’t beaten conquest or echos despite multiple attempts. Has much as I’ve wanted to believe an Ironman is how I would like to play I realize that fire emblem with its current requirements for a game over just doesn’t mix well with an Ironman run. Xcom is the best example of want fe would need to be in order for an Ironman to be popular. The difference between the two is that in a fe iron man if your lord dies it’s over, back to the start redo all those missions and pray for good levels all over again. Not fun. Xcom on the other hand allows you to fail some missions here and there and more importantly if you feel you’ve made a grave mistake most missions allow you evacuate your troops saving them at the cost of failing the mission. So much more engaging of a challenge. If perma death is ever going to shine in a fire emblem game it needs to adopt a more fluid form of story progression and allow a few failures along the way.
@@richardwilliams937 I think an interesting way they could do it is a story that varies it’s difficulty based on wins to losses. So essentially if the player is winning many battles the enemies tighten their defenses making the maps harder, but if you have been losing the enemies have gained more territory (essentially maps to level up on and recruit fodder) so they spread themselves thin making maps easier. There should still be differences between an easy hard mode map and an easy easy mode map.
Also you should be able to retreat like you said with the story progressing. The penalty for retreating would be that the boss character of that map gets stronger and you’ll run into them again on a future story map until they die like if you retreated from all 30 chapter maps the final one has the final boss and every single chapter boss leveled to match the chapter. The boss enemies would ultimately be stronger than a generic unit of that class making the map much harder. You would still be able to kill those bosses on prior story maps. Also to balance the increased difficulty of extra bosses when you retreat you get a few side maps that don’t progress the story those are the maps written since you retreated the enemy gained territory. These maps are for leveling and extra units for any dead units. They wouldn’t have conventional bosses since the bosses are the recruitable fodder for your army. I would say maybe 3 maps so 3 new characters for every retreat and you don’t need to have loss any character and any experience gained you keep.
The recruitable characters I feel can be more akin to Valkyria chronicles where they have characters but are essentially fodder with stories. Any character you recruit should be able to fill whatever role you need but be a bit weaker due to the fact they weren’t fully on your side like mercenaries not willing to die since they don’t have any loyalty yet.
Also maybe the main lord has plot armor so if they die it just means you are forced into retreat losing either one random unit that was deployed or something else like experience or weapons/gold. This would only be for the forced retreats other retreats you choose to initiate you would keep everything besides units that died as it would be seen as a tactical retreat and not a desperate retreat.
And sales plummet, No one wants to deak with that level of brutality in thier games, even darksouls isnt that evil.
I have one issue with perma-death. And it’s honestly how if affects the story. Since any character can die at any time, most characters are just exempt from important story roles and can only build character through supports.
To me, classic + rewind feels like the right setting in modern fire emblems, since I'm still strongly incentivised to solve the puzzle that is the battle map correctly, without needing to restart the whole chapter if I miss a detail. It's casual mode that feels redundant when rewinds are available (though I don't mind it being left in). I'm not realy playing with permadeath, but still play classic.
honestly, perma-death has trained me in a way that the most recent instalments have pushed me away due to ensuring that some characters are inevitably going to die. It's like... you train me to avoid the circumstance you're now forcing on me, what did you think I'd do?
You know, all that talk about how modern Fire Emblem games aren't designed with permadeath in mind got me thinking of another way Nintendo/Intelligent Systems could go about this:
_What if they spilt Fire Emblem into two separate series?_ The first would retain the "Fire Emblem" name, focusing on more complex characters and intertwining stories. It could drop permadeath entirely or just keep it a formality, but it would NOT be _designed_ around permadeath. Levels would be more difficult because they operate under the assumption that the player has a unit or two they can sacrifice to get an advantage. There are advantages to designing this way, as you can make more challenging levels without fear of it becoming impossible under certain circumstances - I think levels that encourage the player to be brave and risky have some merit to them. Basically this series would follow the design philosophy of modern Fire Emblem.
The other series would be similar to Fire Emblem in setting and premise, but would have a different name and _make permadeath a part of its identity._ Levels would be a bit easier but still stressful because every single move the player makes could matter. Perhaps throw in frequent autosaves so the player can't undo their mistakes, and instead help players _learn_ from those mistakes! For accessibility, there could be a mode that still punishes the player for messing up by some other means; there could also be a mechanic that prevents unwinnable situations, such as a scaling system. Most importantly, all of the marketing and messages the game presents will tell the player that _this is THEIR story._ There will be no "perfect ending," and characters will be written with the unexpected death of others in mind. Perhaps someone's untimely death will make another character's arc branch off, making each playthrough unique without players feeling like they've received less. This series would _see just how far you can take permadeath as a mechanism for storytelling._ I think there's a ton of untapped potential here!
TL;DR: Perhaps instead of trying to force permadeath into modern Fire Emblem and risk compromising the artistic vision of the series as it exists today, it could be better to branch off into a separate, more experimental series that actually _revolves around_ permadeath or similar mechanics. This way there could be something that both camps will enjoy!
I think Final Fantasy Advance Tactics’ way of handling permanent death is the best, basically there were these specific areas that had no laws (laws were what’s stopping units from killing each other) so if your battle was in one of these areas you get more serious and stay more focused and when a character dies you kinda accept it, but when the entire game “has no laws” I tend to get kinda bored and not think too much about my moves which forces me to restart the entire chapter.
typo KEKW
I feel like my take on a restructure of this mechanic would be to change how difficulty works. Instead of having your 3 levels of difficulty with the options of casual or classic, just make the 3 levels of difficulty reflect those options.
The 3 levels of difficulty would be:
Casual (the normal mode)
Classic (the permadeath mode)
Lunatic (the "ironman" mode)
Lunatic and classic would not work by changing enemy numbers, stats, or skills, but by changing how death will impact your game play. Classic mode will reinforce the aspect many players enjoy where you keep resetting to find the optimal way to properly strategize and beat a map. Lunatic would enable an auto-save state when a unit(s) die, locking you into that result in that map even when resetting. In such a case, you would have to keep pressing on or start a new save file. And even when pressing on, you can still end up in a game over scenario where you will be forced to start a new file.
I feel like having the game play set up this way would be an interesting step forward. Have the permadeath settings BE the actual difficulty curve instead of having to create several versions of a map for different difficulties and then slapping on classic or casual after the fact.
(Edit: I think making notable enemy changes between my versions of classic and lunatic would be a good idea cuz I realize that they would be pretty really similar otherwise)
This is an interesting idea however if anyone is playing on one difficulty then you have to balance the difficultly for novices and veterans and those three difficulties wouldn't be enough to keep giving you a challenge, but it would always be nice to look for more ways to make things difficult then the generic level increase.
Just found this video, and really enjoyed hearing your take on the subject.
You really gave weight to the art form that's being lost with newer Fire Emblem games, without dismissing the new strengths they've brought to the table or trying to forcibly divide the fandom. Props for the way you've handled this potentially contentious topic!
Perhaps the best approach is a compromise between the personal stories that the player makes up in their head and the written stories in-game?
For instance, hypothetically, if a character dies in Three Houses, then a close friend or rival of theirs won't be in their usual place in Garreg Mach but instead at the graveyard with new dialogue morning the loss.
Perhaps there could even be alternate support interactions where if a character dies with one or more B rank support partners, then extra 'conversations' take place only involving the grieving survivor, thereby tying up the narrative loose ends while still leaving that tragic layer of loss.
Just having a system in place so that players don't feel like the game is narratively punishing them irreparably, give them something that still feels like a loss but at least gives them some closure.
As much as I resent the heavy shipping-wheel focus of Awakening and especially Fates' support wheel, the mechanics consistently did their job of giving depth to the characters and making the player care about them.
The partial return to form in Shadows of Valentia really stung. There were so many characters who, once their recruitment dialogue was finished, barely mattered at all outside of their stats.
Virion, a character unaffiliated with nearly all the cast and who shows up out of nowhere early Awakening, has more characterisation than two of Alm's nearly life-long childhood friends in Shadows of Valentia.
For some players like myself, that is a fatal blow to their investment of those characters, something that no permanent death system can ever fix.
Fire Emblem, both for better and for worse, has outgrown permadeath, with the support conversations serving as the new heart of the series.
And if Intelligent Systems is going to cater to fans of both mechanics, then they'll need to bring narrative incentives, not just gameplay incentives, to play through those permanent deaths.
Here's hoping they can pull that off with an upcoming instalment, because it would be a damn shame to lose either of these systems entirely.
I love Fire Emblem and interacting with the characters is the main joy for me. Playing on Classic with my beloved characters is nerve-wrecking. Yes I want the perfect endings, but it also makes me carefully consider my moves.
I always have my first playthrough on a FE game on Casual. I played Fates on Classic, but felt like I just kept resetting if my favourites were killed. All this did was make me not get attached to certain characters so I can use them as cannon fodder. My first death on Fire Emblem was Arthur on Fates. Like I do not give a crap about him as I already had Camilla as my axe unit.
I know people shit on Three Houses for it’s lack of stakes, but if you didn’t recruit a unit before the timeskip, they are going to die. Having characters you built support with kill each other actually creates such a sad dynamic that I would intentionally have the worst pairing attack each other (Having Ashe kill Lonato was a major one, along with killing Flayn in front of Seteth, even after knowing what is revealed in the paralogue)
I think people are unfair to Three houses in this regard. It is very different but, it went for a different style and I think it achieved it for the most part. It was so different overall i doubt its going to be done again though.
I didn't even know that characters could be revived in some installments. Why did they remove that?
Because they are incredibly dumb.
Engage: has such a big and balanced cast that losing units isn't an issue anyway
The issue of permadeath is that it's inclusion feels more like a punishment system instead of a feature. This is unlike other games where death is not the end of your gameplay experience (namely roguelikes). Fire Emblem basically punishes you twice for a death of a character: once for losing material and exp investment into said unit, once more for losing all the story associated with said character. Thrice if said character was your waifu/husbando. This results in a feature which enriches one aspect of the game, but will overpunish you if you slip up. Other games avoid this by separating characters from the narrative, often with the story told about the circumstances around the adventure rather than about the characters themselves.
The key is... permadeath only works when units are not characters with any real dialogue. Things like Rimworld and XCOM, it doesn't make the characters you make any less of a character, just that the characters can't be "written" by a person and instead have to have emergent stories and the player having their own ideas of who that character is.
In things like Fire Emblem the permadeath leads to characters being written into submission, if they can die then they can't be important because otherwise it's a game over when they die. The fact that the story continues with them dead just the same cheapens their death and makes the character less impactful. Only characters 'pre-written; to die can impact the story and doing that in a tactics RPG feels awful, investing time and effort into raising a unit to have them die for the plot ruins the gameplay, especially in a game like Path of Radiance where you're dealing with finite XP
I definitely enjoyed the listen! (Just popped in the headphones while taking my doggy on a walk)
I was really surprised at the mention of Dark Deity, because that game’s director had to deal with me invading his cities in Civilization while he tried to build Rome in a day xd. Now every time I hear the name of that game I’m like that meme of leonardo dicaprio pointing at the screen
thank you for reminding me of dark deity's existence, I had a good laugh.
Great video, echoed more or less my exact feelings on permadeath. Casual Mode as a concept is fine, but the focus on it has made Classic Mode essentially useless or overly tedious. There's no room for failure in modern Fire Emblem--you have to play perfectly. The games have never done a great job of encouraging players to continue on through their mistakes because there's little benefit to doing so. I think that's what the original intent of the Gaiden missions in FE11 was supposed to be--they weren't a handicap to help players not skilled enough to finish the game without death, they were there to encourage players to keep playing. The devs forget that players are min-maxers by nature and would instead kill off their units to do so which is unfun from a narrative and gameplay perspective.
New games in the series should pick a lane--permadeath or none--the middle ground they have right now is pretty unsatisfying for me at least. If IS decides to make permadeath part of the intended playing experience then future games in the series would have to figure out how to encourage the player to *choose* to play through failure without incentivizing genocide. I've thought of a mechanic where a unit who dies drops an "essence" that is essentially a consumable that offers stats or abilities based on how much experience or battles the unit has seen would work at this. IE: if your fully-trained General dies, he drops an item that gives +4 defense and the Pavise ability to any other unit, however a freshly recruited General would drop nothing upon death. This would force the player to consider continuing on when one of their beloved units falls in battle while also preventing them from sending a bunch of new recruits on a suicide mission to make their core team better. I took the concept for this mechanic from Final Fantasy IV DS where temporary party members give you items that grant abilities based on how many abilities that you gave them while they were in your party.
A Fire Emblem ironman is one of the most rewarding and tense gameplay experiences I've ever had and I would like more people to experience that. Counterintuitively, I've found that Ironmans are less stressful to play through. In normal play, I constantly overanalyze my mistakes and constantly reconsider whether or not I should redo something more perfectly/efficiently, whereas in an Ironman I don't stress about my mistakes I've already made and just keep playing. It's sad that the wider image of an ironman is that it's not for "casuals" and only for hardcore, extremely talented players when I really find the "reset at any mistake, constantly minmax" mentality to be much more of a time and headspace investment. Kaga was right in telling players to not obsess over the perfect ending.
The problem with your system is that people would still probably kill someone who’s easy to level up (like probably the Jagen character in the early game) to give all their stats and abilities to a character who starts weaker but can get better.
The way 3H dances around this issue by essentially giving you mini savestates says it all I think.
I always have and will choose classic on my first playthrough. With that said, I've always reset if I like or invested in a lost unit. This makes a lot of sense, as I started with FE7. I've thought about this topic a lot, but not in the context of the original game, so thanks for bringing a new perspective.
I have to say overall I wouldn't change FE 3H at all, I think it's one of the best games in the series, but, I do hope the series decides to step back for the next entry, to sprinkle in characters over the course and make them feel like less of an investment like in previous entries.
It is always fun watching people bring up the diversity in Fire Emblem then looking at what we got in Smash, wish we could see some of the more unique cast there. Observations aside though...
Every Fire Emblem fan still gets personalized stories, those that lose their characters in classic and those that don't. Those who pick different teams and favorites. But more importantly there is a healthy way for permadeath to exist.
Final Fantasy Tactics uses a "Death counter" where if someone falls in battle you have to end the fight or revive them before the counter hits 0 or they die forever. This system has all the positives of both sides especially since revival often was reviving at low health.
FFTA implemented a system where on Lawless regions if your HP hit zero you were fine as usual... unless the battle ends. Then that character dies.
The reason instant permadeath gets pushed away is there is too much randomness. Critical hits, not being psychic and knowing how you build your team for 10 chapters/stages/maps from now, not knowing there were going to be 20 enemy reinforcements by the side of the map you stuck to. None of this feel organic to many people.
This becomes a poison very quickly because you can only design so much before it starts being unfair or feel inorganic which is the major issue immediate permadeath has. You can't predict that critical hit yet if you do predict everything as a crit then you move so slowly it grinds everything to a halt and you have to pull Xcom and add timers.
The biggest poison is if your Lord dies why does the save not delete itself?
Unless you delete your save and start anew when this happens you haven't truly played permadeath Fire Emblem.
Ngl I’m starting to realise why shadow dragon and Binding blade are so fun to me and it’s got a big thing to do with how perma death feels in the game. I can play these games over and over and get a different experience
And I love The Tellius and Jugdral game for their story and with the second games on the two mini series the difficulty
Lugh in binding blade is an absolute beast, surprised to actually see him dead in footage
Imagine if Fire Emblem had a system like in Dark Souls where it’s CONSTANTLY saving and you CANNOT cheese it with resets. Now that would be an intense FE game in the spirit of its original roots
It would never happen because then Intelligent Systems would have to design a game that accounts for permadeath but I must say I'd go nuts if this ever happened.
@@ChrisTheFields I'd totally agree. FE's become super casual-friendly too (not a bad thing!), but this direction also heavily discourages making the new games too hard
"If something isn't making enough money to survive, its only way out is to appeal to the largest group possible, even if it means to sacrifice its integrity"
- universal law
I actually came up with an idea for a Casual Mode-only mechanic while watching this video.
So, if a character’s HP falls to 0 in battle, they will retreat and enter a damaged state. Either their stats will be reduced or they will be completely fatigued. Either way, the player will need to use materials and resources to heal their wounds or get their spirits back up. This will allow players to want to keep their allies alive so they don’t have to waste their resources that they’d rather use on building units and the like.
It keeps the player on their toes so they feel the motivation and obligation to protect their units while also not taking away their characters forever as a punishment.
Perma death really varies per games and in a game as layered as fire emblem its so hard to implement while feeling both fair and not too gimmicky in terms of save scumming your way out. Games like realm of the mad god, which is a much simpler interpretation of perma death, seeing as you only play one character and if you die on that character you lose it forever it still lets you remake the same character but you take a while to recoup what has been lost and I feel as though something like that needs to be better added like instead of characters just dying forever theyre wounded and you have to do more to treat them in order to make them playable units again.
My first game in the series was Fire Emblem Awakening. I enjoyed it at the time, but it took me a while to get fully into it. Since then, I have played through and beaten most mainline games excluding 2,3,6, and the Tellius Games (played partially 6 and Path of Radiance but haven't finished them yet). I feel like Fire Emblem without permanent death is just any other srpg. What draws me into these games are the stories that get told through my gameplay mistakes. Ironmaning Shadow Dragon H5 has been the most fun I've had, and I grew more attached to the characters through my gameplay choices. I have memories of doing silly, cheesy strats to train bad units like Gordin, and it felt honestly rewarding. I feel sad that the newer games are growing less and less designed around permadeath which leads to poorer designs to the maps and less strategy involved (i.e. unfair ambush spawns which require divine pulse etc.) . I have to admit I do like the supports because I want to learn more about the characters, but it is sad seeing one of my favorite game series of all time going in a different direction than what I enjoy about it.
Permadeath is sort of a double-edged sword for the series. On one hand, it is one of the things that distinguished the series from other SRPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics (the first game had permadeath but is a lot more forgiving about it). On the other hand, it does come across at the expense of characterization, to be honest. There's a reason why most characters in the old FEs are just people with faces and maybe some character traits. It's basically anime XCOM. In any other series, a character like Lilina would probably have a lot more screen time in the game but in FE6 she had some screen time up to the Gaiden chapter where you get Durandal and you never see her again unless you A support her with Roy. A lot of people think that the slow degeneration of the permadeath mechanic is to draw in casuals. That's part of it sure, but I think it also has more to do with the recent direction of the series which is more focused on the characters instead of the setting at large.
For me personally, I reset when I lose someone because I’d like to avoid Strategies where I send Units to their doom
Permadeath has never mattered to me personally. I've always been the type to just reset after losing a unit and would never ever do an ironman run so any changes made haven't affected the way I play.
If there wasn't permadeath, then trading one unit for another like a casual chess game would be the way you'd play because it's just more efficient to make sacrifices.
Not wanting to lose a unit forces you to change the tactics you employ.
I started this series with PoR.
PoR is fairly easy, but not for a beginner.
I've lost almost all the Greil Mercenaries in the first few chapters on my first time playing it, 'cause the game does not explain itself very well (as intended).
The story was so much empowered by this.
Suddenly, all that talking about the struggle Ike and his comrades have to endure had so much meaning you actually FEEL that, with every unit lost, every character whose support and story you'll never see complete.
I felt like in a war, praying, after every move I made, to get everyone out of there alive.
Feeling grief when the music stopped and someone told me his last words.
How emotional it was...
That is Fire Emblem.
Of course, today I break the game in 2 chapters and I'm aware that Lord Ike is basically an unbreakable iron brick wall that no one seem to even be able to catch (and they usually would not deal any damage anyway), which regenerates himself from the damage he deals.
It was a series about WAR in every aspect of it: how we can survive it with our friends, how we can meet new ones even in such hardships, and the pain of knowing that every battle could be the end of both old and new.
Today...it is more a series about how LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP end all wars. Same elements, but opposite interpretation.
In the first iteration, their idea of WAR is brutal: someone will die, on both sides, no matter how good you are, well meaning, or how much you are in the right. WAR IS SHIT.
In the second iteration, war CAN be brutal, but only if you're a bad guy, or if you've lost you're way. Because, if you're in the right, you have all the power you need, even if you're a toddler, to embrace your friends and defeat all the bad guys. War is a bad thing, but you're a good guy, you're friends are good too, so it does not really touch you.
Excluding the narrative, taking in examination only the gameplay, these 2 ideas are basically the opposite of each other.
I would also say that one is extremely educational, and the others is literally the danger of our time (to think that we're good so we can do all the bad we want to those we think are bad, because no consequence will ever touch us good guys), but that is my personal opinion that I understand can't be taken as a fact.
But what's a fact is that, at this point in time, 2 Fire Emblems exist, and I'm a fan only of the first one.
I always appreciated how the series touched the argument of WAR until Awakening came out.
Since then, I've been less and less of a fan, and I don't think I'll buy the next one if that old spirit is not there again in full force.
What made it unique for me was that bad sensation. That feeling, in the end, that I had fun, a lot, but also reflected a lot, I also felt a painful catharsis.
To be honest, seeing that catharsis, that NEGATIVITY, substituted by full POSITIVITY, took away the soul from the series.
And...as a strategy game alone...Fire Emblem is not really the best...
I understood that the only reason why I really like Dimitri's side of TH, is because, at least narratively, the message in his route is still there.
No matter if in the end he wins, he's lost sooooo much.
In the other 3 routes no one ever loses anything he did not decide to give for the cause.
Dimitri loses family, one eye, loyal companions, dignity, his morals, his mind, everything he could.
So that message is still there in the story: WAR is bad either way.
But the gameplay does not support it even in that route 'cause no one dies if you don't want to, and no character loses anything else the moment they meet Byleth again.
FUCKING MUTE JESUS.
'Cause we're special, and war as no power on a such magnificent being.
FUCK that masturbatory message.
This series tryed to make me think, once.
Now it only tries to make me cum.
Out of my trousers game, have some dignity.
*Literally ambush spawns an entire army to give you a standing ovation and every single legendary weapon in the series.*
That was beautiful, holy shit...I'm not being sarcastic, that was actually something I LOVE!! Some of these comments I simply agree with, but this one was an ART PIECE! Just like the video it was placed on, I loved this.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I'm honored. ^^
@@The_Catman No problem! Unfortunately, you died from critical praise damage so your Ironman has been squandered, sorry about that :(
But jokes aside, I do genuinely agree with this, I’m still trying to beat back the vestiges of my old reset instincts, but it’s getting better.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 In these games is really easy for a player to hurt their own experience.
When Rolf joined in my first FE9 run, he told Oscar that he couldn't bear to stay behind because Boyd went off to fight "and he never came back." It's been fifteen years, but I still remember. Only FE's permadeath can make you feel the weight of your decisions like that.
It should be that critical hits or hits that go well above a units HP would have the character unable to say their last words which would make it more interesting.
Tbh I believe that they should have the option for classic mode where if a unit falls in battle you can’t use them anymore that way characters can participate in the story since with classic mode it feels like the feature handicaps the story
There's a select number of units where this essentially happens anyway. In fe7 any unit that would appear in the fe6 story doesn't actually die, but are no longer usable in battle. In the case of marcus and oswin they continue to play a significant role in eliwood and hectors stories even while being unusable
I always thought that perma-death is a wasted feature for many people. The amount of people who would actually continue playing through when they permanently lose someone can probably be counted in one hand. Almost no one would willingly perma-kill a person on their first playthrough.
My first experience with fire emblem was the binding blade. Perma death really taught me that my decisions mattered. It made every kill and inch of exp more worth it. I never restarted any chapter since I was new and still best the normal ending with a very solid team, even though I killed units like Rutger. It was one of the most unforgettable gaming experienced that ive ever had. I never felt so accomplished when playing a game. Claiming this is a wasted feature doesnt feel right and I miss this feature being cord to the design since the newer games dont feel like they can balance difficulty correctly and punish mistakes...
@@geno_xi sounds like you're one of the very few people who actually played through after losing someone, as I have mentioned. I would argue that people who prefer perma-death is a minority, otherwise the devs wouldn't have made such a change in the first place.
I feel like a lot of recruitment in three houses is probably designed for new game-plus when you have more activity slots to grind for support with.
The other big thing with three houses is probably the change in general dynamic compared to most games in the series. Usually, you are a commander leading an army or a royal on the run. In three houses you're a mercenary made into a military academy teacher. That puts more of an emphasis on the growth of units especially the students since their ability is built on what direction they are trained in. It creates a nice variety in builds for characters but makes casual mode look more viable since there is a limited pool of units to get and depending on how well you recruit in the first part fewer units to obtain in the later half of the game.
With the Hardcore Nuzlocke in Pokémon, if we had the ability to rename or chose the name for the other characters, losing them would be more heart breaking
As someone who started with Blazing Sword, permadeath always forced me into a choice. If I restart, then I obviously got another shot at winning without that character dying, but if I let them die, then I potentially save a lot of real time, effort, and frustration to just clear that chapter.
It was always a decision that I had to weigh, and that was one of the coolest game mechanics for me.
Man, I remember my first FE. Was it sacred stones? The one with Erika and Ephraim. I didn't know there was perma-death and I was only left with plot characters, and Seth.
Seth was the man, He was lvl. 20 while everyone was lvl. 7. He'd go in, get surrounded on all four corners then get out with minor scratches, rinse and repeat. He had all the nice shiny things, he got all power up items that I got. He was the storm that is approaching, and you bet he'd uproot anything and everything in his was, be it a lance wielder with horse killer.
And then I read he was the weakest if you min-max everyone and that the baby units were the strongest.
Still, my head canon was Seth is THE hero, and Ephraim/Erika was just riding his coattails. Fight me!!
I don't know who told you that Seth is not the absolute best when min/maxed because Seth is absolutely the best unit in that game and one of the best units in the series. He's just an absolute chad.
@@ChrisTheFields I knew it! My brother was lying! Maybe because he wanted me not to break the game, lol. And that was more than a decade ago! I had no way to confirm it.
It was a cake walk with Seth tbh, maybe I shouldn't have used him? It was like, "easy" easy with him around. But then we have those units that have gimmick weapons like the bat? Dragon? Vampire? Girl that speedruns her stats like crazy, and Ephraim/Erika with their story weapons.
Still, Seth is the MC for me. It was fun stumbling on this video, I might play some FE now that I remember it.
Great Video!!
Have you ever seen "Can You Beat Mass Effect With No Friends?" Wherein the permadeath of characters in previous games ends up causing the various games' narrative to start falling apart at the seams? I understand that Fire Emblem handles that with "oh, a character just received a grievous wound that makes them only able to be a military advisor now!" so that character can be a part of the core narrative." and all, but... I think there is a way to get a Fire Emblem game to embrace permadeath; Grief.
a Fire Emblem game wherein death is shown early on as inevitable and wherein Permadeath can feed into support in a powerful way; mourning happens, maybe those who had support with a character take the time to speak about that character, they gain a memento that gives them the benefits of their support as a solo unit, and having death strengthens the resolve of those who remain behind. Maybe the game sets up something early where attempting to keep the army alive through stratagem turns out to be a selfish play that has rippling conciquences when it was possible to send units on a mission that was most certainly suicide, but their valliant actions pay dividends later.
The last time a fire emblem fan did an iron man run and thought of it as playing normally was today. I was there and doga choked the hell out of that point.
huh. that moment at 15:07. I just had the very same thing happen to me in my pl\aythough, done to every unit not two days ago.
I honestly thought that Ironman was like a natural impulse when playing Fire Emblem. That's how I've played it since I was a child.
Casual can still have punishment aspects to it: in a playthrough that you can't grind for EXP outside main chapters, a character dying early becomes weaker and weaker as the chapters difficulty increase...it can come to the point of not being able to complete a chapter, a "game over" "softlock".