Mechanics that you want

[Othin]

The only part of this that's off is the part about being king. Even your own example proves me right.

My own example proves you right by going against Ike's thoroughly-established views of nobility? What the hell would you consider wrong?

Banzai's response, perhaps? I see you've conveniently ignored that one.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Othin

[Momo]

Change "King" to "Leader" (as in leader of the mercenaries) and that's something Ike would say.

[Othin]

The rest of the quote does not sound like things I recall Ike discussing.

Furthermore, you seem to have conveniently ignored Banzai's example. If your goal is to prove that the characters are so easily interchangeable, then it is your burden to address every example given before proceeding.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Othin

[Momo]

Considering he did it for pay and ended up becoming a lord...

[Aethereal]

The rest of the quote does not sound like things I recall Ike discussing.

Furthermore, you seem to have conveniently ignored Banzai's example. If your goal is to prove that the characters are so easily interchangeable, then it is your burden to address every example given before proceeding.

I actually enjoy Ike's character a lot more than some of the other lords, but I don't think a character's circumstance really defines his personality, and I think Banzai's quote is an example of Ephraim's circumstancial differences from Ike. Ephraim invaded his enemy's country while Renais was being conquered, Ike invaded after Crimea had already been conquered. There's no reason for Ike to feel guilt, because his circumstance never lead to him making a bad decision. Would Ike have made a different decision had he been faced with the option of invading Daien or defending Crimea? Would he have felt differently, even if events unfolded for Crimea the way they had for Renais? Maybe, but that quote doesn't illustrate that, and I don't think we have a way of knowing.

[Anouleth]

Considering he did it for pay and ended up becoming a lord...

Ike is one of those protagonists that isn't actually interested in money or loyalty but just about doing what's "right" or avenging family members who die. While there's nothing wrong with that, it really just means that Ike is not so much the leader of a band of mercenaries as he is the leader of a band of vigilantes.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Anouleth

[Momo]

While I mostly agree, I feel the writing for these characters is really all over the place. Ike doesn't like royalty, but he does nothing but work with them the entire game and even becomes one himself. His brief bouts of thinking something different just come off as more inconsistent writing than not.

[Othin]

Sanaki

You're as impudent and impatient as ever. Heed me, Ike. If you are to help lead the Crimean Liberation Army, you must be given a more appropriate title.

Ike

If you're talking about making me a noble, I'll decline, thanks. That's not my kind of thing.

Sanaki

You are not in a position to refuse. Giving some nameless mercenary control of Begnion's troops would be...problematic. And more importantly, it would affect the troops. You will resign yourself to this and receive peerage from Princess Elincia.

Ike

What? No, wait! This is absurd...Blast! Of all the foolish...

Elincia

I'm...sorry about this. If you're absolutely opposed to it, I won't force you.

Ike

No, I have to do what's necessary. What am I supposed to do now? Put on a funny hat or something?

And then he gets rid of the title as soon as the war is over. I don't see the issue.

[Refa]

I really want leadership stars to be brought back in some way.

I think 50-60 is a solid amount, I hope they don't give us 28 + bonus characters like in FE8.

Yeah, that would be pretty good, although I wouldn't mind around 40 either.

I actually disagree. This is a 1 Player Game, not a Call of Duty / Street Fighter. It also exists in real life war: no two people are likely the same on a battlefield, and there is more than likely one person better than the other. I mean, what is so awesome about balancing characters in a 1P game? Make them usable is fine...

This. For example, FE4 has so many unbalanced elements, but that's what makes it fun IMO.

With skills I think it's a lot easier to balance units (as opposed to simply making one unit per class), and also probably more interesting.

Skills are awesome. Especially when it's done in the FE4/FE9 (maybe 10, never played it) sense. Much more to the detriment of FE8 for trivializing them and FE6/7 for removing them entirely (the latest 2 remakes didn't have them, but well...they're remakes).

A different idea would be to make a pseudo-Jeigan who actually wasn't a prepromote but merely started out better than and ended up worse than your other available first-tier units, like Ruka from FE2 or an earlier joining version of Athena from FE11. What could be done is to give such a character better bases and weapon ranks (perhaps even a high enough weapon rank to wield a Silver earlygame like a "full-on" Jeigan!) but worse growths and a higher level. Then, even if they were more useful for efficiency and stuff, they wouldn't be as broken for those purposes as a strong "full-on" Jeigan would be and that's really what I'm wanting them to avoid: overpowered Jeigans.

...How is that different from a normal Jeigan? In fact, this unit is even better than Jeigan because he can benefit from promotion gains.

I think I have the best idea ever: we implement no growths in the game. :D

After seeing some of dondon's videos, I wouldn't mind an alternate mode where they did just that (of course, increasing units base stats to make them more useable is a must).

Speaking of gender roles, how does everyone feel about the standard blue haired male hero and the frilly princessy support?

The princess has a really dumb hat.

Or just look at the villains in general. Gharnef, Manfloy, Zephiel... The standard archetype of "madman bent on releasing the ancient evil". Nergal is the first point in the series where that madmen reveals himself to have depth beyond being simply a madman (and FE7 even retroactively gives Zephiel depth as well). Moving from there we get Lyon and Sephiran, who continue to move in the direction of conflicted, turmoiled people who were good and then corrupted in one sense or another (if we continue to look at the Radiance Saga as a deconstruction, Ashnard fills the standard villain role... except that the "ancient evil" he seeks to revive isn't all that evil at all). The post-Kaga era has allowed the Fire Emblem plot to evolve from the standard formula in many different ways. I'm especially interested to see who the villain of FE13 will be because of it. To say that "oh it'll just be noble x fleeing from villain y who seeks to unleash monster z" is stripping down what the recent FEs have been to a core and ignoring all of the advancements that the plots have made since FE6.

You're wrong

FE1 (Medeus)- Definetely the most "evil" one, but if you read into his backstory, he initially created the empire to stop persecutions against dragons

FE2-...I dunno, never played this one

FE3 (Hardin)- Typical "Madman bent on releasing the ancient evil"? I think not. He was initially a playable character, and he turned evil in the same fashion that Lyon did (yeah, Lyon wasn't the first).

FE4 (Manfloy)- FE4 has so many more interesting villains than Manfloy, and to soley focus on him is...well, yeah, kind of ignorant. Also, Manfloy probably became twisted after spending years in the Yied temple.

FE6 (Zephiel)- Totally tragic villain there, even before FE7

Why are people hating on the characters of FE1-5 again? Or the Lords for that matter? This whole oversimplification of characters is incredibly narrow minded.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Refa

[Dark Sage]

Personally, I hope we don't have more characters like Ike or Ephraim. I prefer my Lords to not be Marty Stus kthanx.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Dark Sage

[CrashGordon94]

This. For example, FE4 has so many unbalanced elements, but that's what makes it fun IMO.

Actually, I have to say that I disagree with you both. Blancing a game is just good game design, sure it's fine to have a couple intentionally over or underpowered things here and there but the majority of things need to be reasonably balanced, even if it IS only a single player game.

...How is that different from a normal Jeigan? In fact, this unit is even better than Jeigan because he can benefit from promotion gains.

Because the're not promoted, if they start out better than the other unpromoted units it won't be quite as pronounced because they're aren't prepromoted. Ruka really is a good example since he starts out better than the villagers but ends up worse than them (except perhaps Robin), but FE9!Gatrie would've been another reasonably example if he didn't leave, maybe.

[Refa]

It'd be interesting to see a main lord who was more of a leader than a fighter. I dunno, give him crappy growths and decent base stats, but a lot of leadership stars an maybe an uber weapon later on.

Actually, I have to say that I disagree with you both. Blancing a game is just good game design, sure it's fine to have a couple intentionally over or underpowered things here and there but the majority of things need to be reasonably balanced, even if it IS only a single player game.

Why does blancing a game = good game design?

Edited November 10, 2011 by Refa

[Rewjeo]

I like that idea of a leader who provides bonuses to those around him, but is a poor fighter him/herself.

[Celice]

Why does blancing a game = good game design?

Balancing leads to no design at all. It eventually withers into absolute neutrality, where there is no individuality or outrageous circumstances. If completely balanced, every moment of the game will play exactly the same, interchangeable, resoundingly. There is no moment that the gameplay is shook up, because everything has been anticipated and molded in such a way that one side does not exceed the other.

[CrashGordon94]

Why does blancing a game = good game design?

Why does having blatantly broken people trivialise the entire game make it any better?

And I know that you can't have everything completely balanced, but having GOOD balance means that the little ups and downs of everyone would generally roughly balance out, which is one of the core tenants of good game design, basically.

[General Banzai]

Balancing leads to no design at all. It eventually withers into absolute neutrality, where there is no individuality or outrageous circumstances. If completely balanced, every moment of the game will play exactly the same, interchangeable, resoundingly. There is no moment that the gameplay is shook up, because everything has been anticipated and molded in such a way that one side does not exceed the other.

Uhhh... wrong.

You could have a Pegasus Knight and a Myrmidon who are almost identical in quality (next to each other on the tier list), and yet they play completely differently.

Unbalanced components are what make these games boring. Think of how trivial FESS and Part 3 of FERD are with Seth/Haar. "You don't have to use them." What if you want to, though? What if Seth and Haar are your favorite character and you want to use them every time but when you do the game just becomes boring? That's almost worst than having your favorite character be someone who is utterly useless.

[eclipse]

Pretty sure things weren't boring in RD when Haar was around. . .or maybe it's because he was allergic to Speed growth.

Seth can ROFLSTOMP in postgame. Or the main game. Either way, using him isn't boring, either.

Boring is when I'm forced to use a particular strategy, because any deviance results in a Game Over.

[Rehab]

Not that I think it's terribly likely to happen in a Fire Emblem game anytime soon, much less this game, but what's necessarily wrong with a "self-insert" character? Many role-playing games are pretty much all about giving you opportunities to develop a character, whose role you are playing. This doesn't mean you'd necessarily have to do whatever you would do, exactly, it means you're "inserting" a character whose motivations and thoughts you can imagine for yourself.

You have to be given a lot of opportunities to make decisions and contextualize them to make this work in a videogame RPG, of course, but it has been done. The problem with FE7's self-insert was that it didn't really count for anything- you answered a few questions directed at you, but you were never given a chance to establish real motivations or a personality, or even make more than a couple of decisions that actually affected your fate. At least, any more than it was implied that you, yes, YOU, were the one telling everybody what to do during a battle.

I take Fire Emblem's usual method to be to tell the player a story of its own, and I certainly don't have a problem with that. But, if we were given a chance to really construct a unique perspective on the world Fire Emblem is presenting us with? Fuck yeah, I'd play that!

My apologies if this bit has been done to death in the previous 38 pages )x>

Edited November 10, 2011 by Rehab

[Snowy_One]

Not really. Typically, Steel weapons are less accurate and heavier (a big issue in GBAFE).

FE7

Iron swords have 90 ACC and 5 wgt. Silver swords have 80 ACC and 8 weight. However silver swords have 8 more MT. It seems pretty clear to me that, durability aside, the silver is the outright superior weapon. If I'm ever in a position where that 10 ACC is, somehow, worth lowering my MT by 8, I am either fighting really weak enemies or have a really powerful charater.

If your unit does enough damage with Iron, you would pick Iron because it's cheaper and more reliable. Iron is usually more accurate than Silver as well, and money is often a concern in more difficult Fire Emblems like FE12 where penny-pinching lets you use the Arena and buy stat boosters and forges.

Alright... In FE7 and 8, how many times would you willingly forgo upgrading to steel/silver in favor of spending money elsewhere?

And there's a wide variety of other weapons that allow for choice.

I am not against choice. I just see the continual upgrade from bronze -> Iron -> Steel -> Silver as a pointless and outdated relic of the old-time RPG's that can be dealt away with.

I think it's a natural part of an RPG. The player finds powerful weapons. Having cool, powerful weapons is exciting, and having lots of them towards the end of the game makes them feel powerful. Like in Link to the Past; Link doesn't hold on to his crappy starting sword even after he gets the Master Sword. Why should the starting sword have an "advantage"? The Master Sword is supposed to be stronger. And it makes the player feel awesome when they go back into the Light World and kill the enemies with ease.

The master sword also meant something because of the amount and effort you put into acquiring it. The Biggoron sword? You worked hard to get it and it had its own set of drawbacks and advantages (more damage for the inability to use your shield IIRC. I got it only once a long time ago). Besides, this kind of shows my point if you think about it. In Zelda, almost none of the upgrades you can buy for any weapon are offered standard. You don't just walk into a shop and have someone upgrade your sword for a small amount of money, and instead the upgrade is given to you in-game without any direct cost to the player. However, why don't you use the Master Sword all the time? Why ever use the megaton hammer or the bow and arrow? The answer is because each weapon has its own unique role in combat to fill and it is far from a trivial one. But if that is true, why ever go back to the sword? Because it's your baseline weapon and you can be assured it will always do well, just that it can't be used for every situation.

How humourless. I can only imagine that you go through World of Warcraft saying "what's the point in having all this gear if some of it is obviously better than other pieces? it's almost like this is some kind of RPG where character and equipment progression is part of the fun of playing!".

You realize that this exact scenario happened in WoW, right? Most prominently, in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, people were given a certain amount of badges for beating bosses and dungeons. These badges could be then taken in and traded in for tier pieces. The idea was to offer raid-level gear to players who couldn't manage to get into a raiding guild. With each new raid came a new set of gear designed to get people up to par. The result was people would run the lower-end dungeons that gave high badge-counts constantly, not even caring about the gear unless they had recently reached 80, then taking the badges and going to the highest-end tier-trader they could afford and ignored all others to get the best gear they could. Towards the end of the expansion, you could get gear well above most raid-level gear just through raiding and, as a result, outside of achievement seekers, people didn't run the simpler raids, instead choosing to get the vendored gear and charge into Icecrown. That's the problem with a obvious upgrade that can simply be purchased or acquired through little effort, it becomes a meaningless upgrade that might as well just be removed from the game.

They are in limited supply since you do not have infinite money.

Unless the money-belt is super-tight, you will have the money (In FE9, the only time I had funding issues was towards the end of the game and even then I had plenty of silver weapons for example). Even then, it's not 'What does the silver weapon offer that my basic weapon does not' but 'damn it! I was sleepy and forgot to steal that gem! I can't get that silver weapon until next-map!'

What do you mean? I never really have a "default" weapon in mind. I throw a ton of weapons on a character and pick whatever's most appropriate for the situation in terms of AS, ATK, WTC, HIT, and CRIT. If I pick a particular weapon type more than others... I don't really notice it, I guess.

I also assume you throw on a iron, steel, and silver weapon as well just to 'get ready'?

This is my main problem with all of what you said. What you may be forgetting is that there aren't just swords in FE. You have more than ten weapon types, and that's more than enough to show one big problem with your system.

Discarding bronze, steel and silver to only keep iron + bonus damage weapons(doing of course the same for spells), leads to every type ending up with far too few items; the game becomes boring.

Then add more weapons with unique effects (not bonus damage of necessity)

Adding bonus damage weapons against types of units that you couldn't get any bonus against before(like let's say berserkers), or even special bonuses-like more visibiliy in FoW for example- ends up with the game forcing you to play a certain way far too much; you lose your capacity of choice, the game becomes boring.

That's a product of poor game design and isn't related to the question of if the old clunky iron/steel/silver should be kept or not. It can exist with either with ease.

The main difference that makes this comparison pointless is that it's a RPG, so it has very few and unique playable characters with a very high number of ennemy types, ehancing the possibility of weapons with attributes. That can't be said of a game like Fire Emblem. Plus, I clearly disagree that money is almost never an issue in the latter, as, simply put, it almost always is to me. Dunno if you play hard modes or if you're used to arena abusing, but depending on your playstyle, money can really be a crucial factor in buying a stronger weapon or not. It clearly isn't in 99% of classic RPGs.

Actually they are very similar. In FF 1-6, upgrading weapons was handled in your traditional RPG way with shops upgrading equipment as you progressed. It wasn't until later on that newer systems came about. FE9 had a interesting one in which each weapon and armor offered unique skills that could be learned if you wore it long enough, making even old junk items have value simply because they could help you learn skills. Even then though, once skills were learned, unless a piece of armor had a kick-ass skill, you were going with the stronger weapons every time. FFX removed stats from the weapons entirely making each weapon dependent on its skills for value and it is the ONLY non-Elderscrolls game I play where I carry more than 2-3 different weapons/armor for each character around and actually have to make choices as to what they wear/use when it comes down to the actual battles.

That, and you are comparing the core system of Starcraft II to the weapon system of Fire Emblem. Seriously, there is far more to Fire Emblem than weapons.

The point isn't the core system, but rather the choice. You are being put into situations constantly where you have multiple options to choose from and each can have radically different outcomes. While, yes, some units are indeed better than others, every unit still has its place and a good player knows how to understand and utilize each unit well in strategies. You don't get that in FE. In FE, you will always be going with your default weapon unless there is another weapon which will do clearly better. Unless you are fighting loads of weaklings you will always be going with your strongest weapon. There is no need to consider, no need to think, or anything of the sort.

[General Banzai]

Not that I think it's terribly likely to happen in a Fire Emblem game anytime soon, much less this game, but what's necessarily wrong with a "self-insert" character? Many role-playing games are pretty much all about giving you opportunities to develop a character, whose role you are playing. This doesn't mean you'd necessarily have to do whatever you would do, exactly, it means you're "inserting" a character whose motivations and thoughts you can imagine for yourself.

You have to be given a lot of opportunities to make decisions and contextualize them to make this work in a videogame RPG, of course, but it has been done. The problem with FE7's self-insert was that it didn't really count for anything- you answered a few questions directed at you, but you were never given a chance to establish real motivations or a personality, or even make more than a couple of decisions that actually affected your fate. At least, any more than it was implied that you, yes, YOU, were the one telling everybody what to do during a battle.

I take Fire Emblem's usual method to be to tell the player a story of its own, and I certainly don't have a problem with that. But, if we were given a chance to really construct a unique perspective on the world Fire Emblem is presenting us with? Fuck yeah, I'd play that!

My apologies if this bit has been done to death in the previous 38 pages )x>

No matter what you're only ever going to be able to "develop" your character by answering a series of questions/decisions, and those answers/questions are only ever going to allow you to develop your character along pre-existing and cleanly separated lines. There is no way to truly be "unique" but rather decide to be one of a handful of personality types. In either case the plot will have to progress regardless of what your decisions are and so your decisions most likely will only ever to make a purely superficial or cosmetic change to the game. In doing so that means that what your character's personality truly doesn't matter in the main thrust of the plot meaning that we have returned to the old FE plot style of extrinsic forces motivating the main character from objective to objective... which leads to a lack of compelling drama.

I mean you talk about making "a unique perspective on the world Fire Emblem is presenting us with" but the problem is that that perspective would ultimately mean nothing. Even if IS made, say, three completely different plot lines to follow depending on your decisions, you're still trapped on the rails of those plot lines and the entire "decision making" process could have been shortened into one simple decision of which plot line to take. I couldn't even fathom the amount of bad Path of Radiance would be if at nearly every point in the story the player could make Ike give a "good" response, a "bad" response, or some kind of "neutral" response. It would make Ike himself a nonentity.

FE7 through FERD were consistently praised by critics for their storytelling and plot. Through both the recent Fire Emblem series as well as the Paper Mario series, Intelligent Systems has demonstrated skill in this arena. Why would we want to revert from that? People on here keep asking for cheap little gameplay gimmicks at the cost of the complete story. What's worse is that some of these same people turn back to say "well the characters already suck so who cares?"

[Refa]

Why does having blatantly broken people trivialise the entire game make it any better?

And I know that you can't have everything completely balanced, but having GOOD balance means that the little ups and downs of everyone would generally roughly balance out, which is one of the core tenants of good game design, basically.

You didn't answer my question. Balancing a game in and of itself does not equate to good game design, because that means that any game that isn't balanced is fundamentally flawed, which isn't the case. Sure, balance is incredibly important for SRPGs, but take Mario World for example. The cape isn't balanced, but it makes the game a lot of fun. Fun = good game design. If a FE game is horribly balanced, it may not be as fun, but again, balance is not one of the core tenants of good game design. It can help improve a game that could benefit from it, like FE or Starcraft, but it's not something that neccesarily needs to be taken into consideration for every game ever made.

I couldn't even fathom the amount of bad Path of Radiance would be if at nearly every point in the story the player could make Ike give a "good" response, a "bad" response, or some kind of "neutral" response. It would make Ike himself a nonentity.

...Have Ike make the decisions? Clearly someone has never played Tactics Ogre.

(in a less obnoxiously condescending way, TO is an SRPG where you can make choices as the main character at critical junctures in the storyline without making every decision for him, meaning he still had a personality)

Edited November 10, 2011 by Refa

[dondon151]

balance is not one of the core tenants of good game design.

Depending on the genre, it most definitely is.

[Colonel M]

dondon is right, there are some exceptions to balance being necessary to an extent. Mostly, multi-player games should really use more balance. There's reasons why most World of Warcraft players won't do PvP, even with a 10 foot poleax.

[General Banzai]

...Have Ike make the decisions? Clearly someone has never played Tactics Ogre.

(in a less obnoxiously condescending way, TO is an SRPG where you can make choices as the main character at critical junctures in the storyline without making every decision for him, meaning he still had a personality)

That wouldn't be a problem at all. I mean, having three different storylines based on decisions you make at critical junctures would increase replay value and perhaps add depth to the overall story (seeing it from different perspectives, etc--like Eirika vs Ephraim route). However, what the person who I originally responded to was saying was to have a faceless, player-defined main character whose personality was based around decisions which would need to be quite frequent.

[Refa]

Depending on the genre, it most definitely is.

If it's genre dependent, it can't be one of the core tenants of good game design.