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The Turnwheel/Divine Pulse as a MyCastle Building


Hawkwing
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Would you prefer if the Turnwheel/Divine Pulse mechanic was a MyCastle Building?  

8 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you prefer if the Turnwheel/Divine Pulse mechanic was a MyCastle Building?

    • Yes
      4
    • No
      2
    • The Turnwheel should be given in the story first, but upgrading it is the players choice.
      2
    • Other
      0


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Note that this topic is not about whether or not Fates should have had a turnwheel-like mechanic, nor if MyCastle should return. This discussion is simply about if a future Fire Emblem game has MyCastle-like building mechanics, whether or not you think the turnwheel should be integrated into it. 

As generally well-received as the turnwheel and divine pulse mechanics have been in Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses respectfully, two common criticisms I have seen towards being able to rewind to an earlier parts of a battle is the the player is given a few too many uses to do so, which can allow for some reckless strategies. The other critique I've seen is that despite being easy to ignore, there is no official way to turn it off if the player wishes to do a full-fledged Ironman run.

When playing through Conquest for the first time, there were a number of moments where I wished the game had a turnwheel-like mechanic (albeit one HEAVILY toned down when compared to Echoes and Three Houses, as I feel that having more than 5 or 7 uses and being able to go back to the very first turn would reduce quite a lot of the well-constructed challenge the game has), largely whenever I encountered typical Fire Emblem bullcrap (I.E. enemies critting with single digit crit rates, or someone missing a 90% chance to hit leads to a units death via the butterfly effect, and so on) or when I found out the hard way that a mechanic/gimmick/skill/weapon/etc. did X when I was expecting it to do Y. I especially would have liked such a mechanic near the end of the game, where levels could often take an hour or two to complete, and having a unit die in the last stretch could be extremely frustrating.

While it's a mechanic I'm okay with not appearing in every game, I did enjoy MyCastle. Even if I have a few reservations towards the handling of certain buildings, I liked how the player had to prioritize what facilities to buy and upgrade. After some thought, I believe that making the turnwheel/Divine Pulse a building that the player could buy and eventually upgrade would be the better alternative than simply handing it to them early on in the story.

This way, the player would have to decide whether they prioritize being able to rewind in battle over obtaining something like the armory or mess hall first, or if they'll risk a unit dying permanently (or having to reset the level) to equip their army with more well rounded weaponry and items. Since being able to upgrade buildings only appears after the player is a certain distance into the game, this would also prevent having to many opportunities to turn back time early on. It would be in the players hands rather than the games for how much utility they would get out of the turnwheel/Divine Pulse mechanic, and add to the already interesting conundrum of what faculties the player wishes to gain first.

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I wouldn't like this, mostly because I feel that the divine pulse by its very nature isn't supposed to be balanced.

The appeal of the divine pulse is to people who play the game and experience moments of "this isn't fair, I don't deserve do have to replay this whole level because I didn't deserve to lose," or "I don't want to have to play this level all over again to get back to where I was".

Setting aside my belief that if players are ever experiencing either of those things, it means there's something fundamentally wrong with the game's design that should actually be addressed rather than putting a time travel band-aid over it that the hardcore will not remotely benefit from...

...making the turnwheel "balanced" so that the player still risks getting a game over with the number of rewinds they're given isn't going to satisfy a lot of these people. Especially not the latter camp who never want to have to restart a map for any reason. I think trying to treat it as a core game mechanic in any way whatsoever, especially when you let the player upgrade it, is fundamentally the wrong way to look at the thing. It encourages game design that anyone who doesn't use it will despise, as I feel Three Houses pretty heavily demonstrated. I maintain, as I always have, that if they want a rewind system in the game, they should make it part of difficulty customization, letting you decide how many rewinds you get per map. You just decide as many as you want, and you don't collect upgrades to improve it.

Also, as an aside, ignoring a building I can build in my castle for the sake of challenge isn't much different functionally from ignoring a button I can press for the sake of challenge, except that in this case I'd get to spend the resources elsewhere. So I don't see this helping in any way. All you're basically asking is if I would have preferred it if, in the statue repair section of the Monastery, all of the divine pulse upgrades were on one statue and I didn't have to pay for them to get anything else I wanted. Yes, that would have been a marginal improvement, but I'd still hate everything the divine pulse did to map design. It would make the story a bit less annoying with divine pulse though if they blurred whether it was canon or not by locking it completely behind a "minigame" like this.

Edited by Alastor15243
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