How to improve Fire Emblem Awakening

[CT075]

this is quite literally the first time i've ever seen someone complaining that grinding is possible in an rpg

it's actually pretty refreshing after hearing so many people criticizing FE for not having any readily-available grinding options when they're too hard

[Thor Odinson]

I also apologize as I haven't seen all supports in Awakening or Mystery of the New Emblem, so I may have missed out on things, etcetera.

wrt Awakening: you haven't missed much. Most of the supports are, at its core, just repeating the same information over and over again with different words. FE:A supports are really quantity over quality. Gets pretty damn stale.

[XeKr]

I think you raise some good points here. Stilll, call me daft, but I've gotta massively disagree with adding an easy mode to Dark Souls. Difficulty is the premise of the game. I'd rather they take the resources used in developing an easy mode and improve the game in alternative fashion. That's how I see it for just about any optional feature in a video game that I take issue with.

Just curious, do you not see this as selfish to an extent? 'I don’t like it (even if it’s optional). I would rather they replace it with something else I would like (even if others may like it as is).' This statement is how I interpret your position, and the content in parentheses is implied.

Also, for Easy/Casual modes in general, appealing to a wider audience may have other benefits (even for you, or others who may never touch them), as it may help the company, the series, and future games as a whole.

LATE EDIT: btw side point, fog of war is a nice mechanic in strategy games if there’s scouting counterplay, with expendable units. It is however extremely difficult to implement well in games with permadeath, where many players consider it a loss if any one unit dies.

And for the record, I think Sol/Nosferatu + Rescue/possibly Galeforce completes Lunatic+ with a combination of low turncounts and high reliability. Though almost certainly less reliable than bows, admittedly.

Edited March 7, 2014 by XeKr

[Interceptor]

Do you mean the alternatives aren't reliable? If so, that was my point. If not, I was not aware of other viable core-strategies, so perhaps this is indeed simply my own lack of ability to play the game. What do you have in mind besides bows, turtling, grinding, resetting?

That's four things.

Bows are just a means to an end: attacking enemies beyond the range of Counter, and protecting people on Enemy Phase from killing themselves. You can get there with other methods like Galeforce, an alternative 2-range attack (like tomes or Levins), OHKOing with crit/skill activations, trading away weapons for Enemy Phase, healing through the damage with Nosferatu/Sol, Rescue-bombing, etc. Lunatic+ rewards creativity. I just used Bows because they are simple and were synergistic with my chosen style for the playlog.

Some options are less reliable than others. I chose only the highest-reliability options on purpose, but you can have variety by introducing some chance/chaos. The decision of which is more important, is up to the player.

Simple. If you are the sort of player that doesn't want anybody to die, you skip out on recruiting Athena. The idea is to preserve as many units as possible (emphasis on the possible). Though yeah, this is just common player-rule. Certainly not binding, but an unspoken rule many of us adhere to. It is war, but the sort you can play to perfection!

You appear to have missed the point. There is only one way to recruit Athena, and that's on the backs of dead units. You literally miss out on content by having a perfect record. The implication here, is that death is a natural part of the game. This is Fire Emblem. We don't need to go into franchises that are NOT Fire Emblem. There's no alignment meter here, just life and death.

People who aren't willing to take advantage of what's offered to them, undermine their cases against Lunatic+, by muddying the waters with nonsensical scrub rules.

Certainly. The developors realized that they might've made the game too easy, thus opted to make the enemies serve as a potential threat no matter how much players relied on exploits (counter, pavis+, aegis+, hawkeye) and made it to where players couldn't rely on previous knowledge of the level set up thanks to randomness of the skill distribution. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that this really limited the players options in how to reliably complete the game. I agree that the random skill selection combats common FE strategies, but don't believe it was (or ought to have been) their intent to massively limit the way the game could be played.

This explanation is not reasonable.

We know what actually happened: two skills got imported as-is (Pass and Counter), the other five are modified skills that had the RNG-factor eliminated. It's very hard to look at what these skills do, and come to the conclusion that the devs didn't deliberately try counter specific strategies. After all, when it comes to skills, they could have done basically anything that they wanted, so what they did NOT do also tells you a story:

- Stat-bombs: No Rally skills (and we know that enemies know how to use these), no random +stat skills, no -faire skills. This is a very easy way to add difficulty on top of base Lunatic.

- Skills with random activation: No troll Miracles, Lethalities. No Sol, Aether, Ignis, Vengeance, nothing. Not unless the class would have already had the skill anyway.

- Breakers, Conquest: Nothing that bypasses the triangle, or eliminates the ability to use special weapons strategically.

Instead, we got Pass, Counter, Aegis+/Pavise+, Vantage+, Hawkeye, and Luna+. All of those skills pressure various popular strategies (meatshielding, super-units, dodge-tanking, DEF-tanking, babying, etc) in such a way that you have to react on the fly (because of the random distribution). If you don't recognize the intent here, I'd say that either you're not really looking hard enough, or we've just witnessed the craziest coincidence in the history of the series.

Nah, I don't think you believe that.

Telling me what I do or do not believe, is a great strategy for earning a one-way ticket to my Shit List.

To demonstrate, lets say there's a free weapon that can be acquired in chapter one a limitless number of times. Lets say the weapon automatically allows you to kill any enemy 100% in one round, has limitless uses and also makes the wielder invincible. Do you think it's a good idea for the developors to include such a weapon? After all, one doesn't have to use it, no? I'm all for everyone having fun and don't buy into elitist BS, but you'll find that accessibility is not the only consideration made when developing a game. Otherwise, why stop at grinding? Grinding, after all, requires time. Not everyone has time. Why not just include "auto-level up" feature that lets you level up to your hearts content in an instant? I'm sure we can agree that there has to be line drawn somewhere.

Why stop there? Go for the ultimate absurdity: begin the game, push START to immediately win.

In reality, none of the BS you described actually exists. If you're at the point where you have to justify your position by citing unicorns and fairy dust, consider the possibility that your argument isn't actually any good in the first place. There's no evidence of a slippery slope here. Fire Emblem simply does not do anything like you've described at all, so if you're going to complain, maybe wait until they actually do something objectionable. Grinding is safely tucked away within the Outrealm Gate, Spotpass, and in pay-to-spar boxes. This is well out of the way of people who want nothing to do with it.

And no, I must contest the idea that I simply don't want other people to have fun.

That's fascinating, since available evidence suggests otherwise. There are people playing FE who enjoy the act or result of grinding, and your OP basically advocates slapping that cookie right the hell out of their mouths unless they play in your sandbox. This is classic SHFG.

The game already penalizes people who grind in the higher difficulties (to some extent), by limiting Spotpass/Risen returns. They wisely chose not to cause the shitstorm of the century by inhibiting people from using their paid DLC. We can safely stop right there without going further.

If I'm correct about some of the optional elements not being good, perhaps developor resources would be better spent elsewhere. I for one woud've liked to see better storyteling!

Not likely to get that out of a code monkey. "Developer" isn't some kind of universal currency like gil. You might have coders, artists, writers, managers, etc that can't necessarily be re-purposed for something outside their area of expertise. One of the reasons that Lunatic+ is the way that it is, might be because the art assets required for it were relatively minimal.

[Moira]

For grinding, I think the best thing to aim for is the pace is as perfect as possible without grinding, being easier on normal and harder on lunatic respectively. Using grinding to allow the player to make wanted adjustments to their difficulty is alright, as long as grinding isn't necessary for a fun experience. (and so far grinding hasn't be necessary, to it checks out). There's nothing I hate more when I'm playing something like Final Fantasy (though not specifically Final Fantasy, just the gameplay) and you need to go through grinding just to be able to beat it. But those games are almost set up so that you're forced tog rind before you get to where you need to be, and random encounters really annoy me after a while.

[LightLelouch]

Here's the thing: turn limits, deployment limits including fatigue), and restricting items are all things that can be self-imposed challenges (although low deployment caps would actually make no difference on Lunatic because lowmanning is the best strategy), but there's simply no way to simulate randomly generated skills. Fog of War, new objectives and Ballistae (if included, which I'd like) should be on all difficulties as well.

This is true, but can be remedied by (in addition to implementing some or all of these features) rewarding the player for completing the game under these conditions. Hell, I'd be a lot more inclined to play current Luna+ (and subsequently less critical of it) without even an ounce of grinding if it meant getting a secret ending, additional support conversations, a bonus map or something. Bragging rights simply isn't a good incentive.

Just curious, do you not see this as selfish to an extent? 'I don’t like it (even if it’s optional). I would rather they replace it with something else I would like (even if others may like it as is).' This statement is how I interpret your position, and the content in parentheses is implied.

Also, for Easy/Casual modes in general, appealing to a wider audience may have other benefits (even for you, or others who may never touch them), as it may help the company, the series, and future games as a whole.

LATE EDIT: btw side point, fog of war is a nice mechanic in strategy games if there’s scouting counterplay, with expendable units. It is however extremely difficult to implement well in games with permadeath, where many players consider it a loss if any one unit dies.

And for the record, I think Sol/Nosferatu + Rescue/possibly Galeforce completes Lunatic+ with a combination of low turncounts and high reliability. Though almost certainly less reliable than bows, admittedly.

Do I see it as selfish? As far as my interest is concerned, absolutely. I won't deny that my motivations are entirely comrprised of self-interest whether I can demonstrate that my suggestions are better off for the game's target audience or not. Disregarding my intentions, however, there's truth to my position. I'd say that considering the limits on the games resources is a good consideration and helps to expose the flaw with the "it's optional" argument. You can make a lot of things optional, but at the end of the day, we must ask ourselves what kind of game the developors are trying to make.

Also, for Easy/Casual modes in general, appealing a wider audience may have other benefits (even for you, or others who may never touch them), as it may help the company, the series, and future games as a whole.

Attempting to broaden your audience is fine. After all, at the end of the day, the developors are trying to sell a game. To make a profit. Not one lick of what I say matters if they can't do that. However, we should keep in mind the potential problems with this route. I believe Bioware saw these problems firsthand after they made Dragon Age. EA made the effort to appeal further to the COD fanbase (their words), but it proved to be their downfall.

Lets be clear that I'm not speaking out against Easy/Casual modes for Fire Emblem. I believe they serve there place here giving how the game has been marketed. In terms of Dark Souls though, it's a game that has the selling point of being difficult. It appeals exclusively to people who want a challenge. An easy/casual mode might possibly appeal to a wider audience, but the sacrifices needed to implement such a mode may simaltaneously lose some members of the existing audience. It's a balancing act, if you will. Can't please everyone. Besides, as someone else noted, Dark Souls does get easy over the course of time once you begin to master the system.

That's four things.

Bows are just a means to an end: attacking enemies beyond the range of Counter, and protecting people on Enemy Phase from killing themselves. You can get there with other methods like Galeforce, an alternative 2-range attack (like tomes or Levins), OHKOing with crit/skill activations, trading away weapons for Enemy Phase, healing through the damage with Nosferatu/Sol, Rescue-bombing, etc. Lunatic+ rewards creativity. I just used Bows because they are simple and were synergistic with my chosen style for the playlog.

Some options are less reliable than others. I chose only the highest-reliability options on purpose, but you can have variety by introducing some chance/chaos. The decision of which is more important, is up to the player.

Bows are highly reliable because they eliminate having to deal with counter, which is really the main issue when it comes to Luna+. All of that other stuff is a lot simpler to deal with, even without resetting. You're the right that the decision of what options to use are up to the player, but the player is going to have hell of more stressful time with the difficulty exercising some options over the one you've described.

-Galeforce: You won't have this skill on a number of characters for a significant portion of the game in non-grinding run. Pavis+/Aegis+ make one-rouding enemies more difficult, thus reliance on the skill is not a good idea until your character is sufficiently powerful.

-Alternative Two Range Attacks: This alone won't save you on counter-heavy enemy phases.

-OHKO'ing via crits: RNG

-Trading Away Weapons: I admitelly haven't tried this, so I can't comment.

-Nosferature/Sol: Will screw you over against multiple enemies.

-Rescue-bombing: Not enough rescue staves before ch.22 if this is going be the core of your strategy.

The level of reliability between bows and other tactics are worlds apart.

You appear to have missed the point. There is only one way to recruit Athena, and that's on the backs of dead units. You literally miss out on content by having a perfect record. The implication here, is that death is a natural part of the game. This is Fire Emblem. We don't need to go into franchises that are NOT Fire Emblem. There's no alignment meter here, just life and death.

People who aren't willing to take advantage of what's offered to them, undermine their cases against Lunatic+, by muddying the waters with nonsensical scrub rules.

I'm in no way attempting to suggest that playing without anybody dying is the only way to play the game. I actually agree that it's simply a "scrub rule." Nonetheless, it's the way a great deal of players play the game. To many people, letting a unit die means failure. This is why having the enemies suicidally go after a weak villager NPCs or otherwise unimportant units works. A lot of players will reset the game right there. Without this consideration, much of the game's difficulty vanishes and you can take advantage of the idiotic A.I killing weak units by using them as bait. There's an argument to be made that the most of the game's in the series are reliant on the assumption that players want to preserve their units.

Shadow Dragon is unique in that its the only game that rewards you for letting your units die (also POR, but not so much of a reward as it is a silver medal for losing to the Black Knight, thus getting a different character as a consolation prize). I don't buy that the game is meant to be played by killing off your units, but even pacfying Shadow Dragon as an example on the basis that you get additional content for letting units die, one can use this reasoning to the opposite effect in FE:A's case.. In FE:A, there's a benefit to keeping your units alive. You can get access to the support content (which is expanded further in DLCs) marry nearly all of them off and produce rather powerful children down the line (each with ample support dialogue) and see their epilogues. Just as you're rewarded in SD for letting units die, you're rewarded (with additional content) for keeping them alive in FE:A.

This explanation is not reasonable.

We know what actually happened: two skills got imported as-is (Pass and Counter), the other five are modified skills that had the RNG-factor eliminated. It's very hard to look at what these skills do, and come to the conclusion that the devs didn't deliberately try counter specific strategies. After all, when it comes to skills, they could have done basically anything that they wanted, so what they did NOT do also tells you a story:

- Stat-bombs: No Rally skills (and we know that enemies know how to use these), no random +stat skills, no -faire skills. This is a very easy way to add difficulty on top of base Lunatic.

- Skills with random activation: No troll Miracles, Lethalities. No Sol, Aether, Ignis, Vengeance, nothing. Not unless the class would have already had the skill anyway.

- Breakers, Conquest: Nothing that bypasses the triangle, or eliminates the ability to use special weapons strategically.

Instead, we got Pass, Counter, Aegis+/Pavise+, Vantage+, Hawkeye, and Luna+. All of those skills pressure various popular strategies (meatshielding, super-units, dodge-tanking, DEF-tanking, babying, etc) in such a way that you have to react on the fly (because of the random distribution). If you don't recognize the intent here, I'd say that either you're not really looking hard enough, or we've just witnessed the craziest coincidence in the history of the series.

Our explanations don't contradict each other. You've described in detail how the developors have sought to make an immensenly harder difficulty by countering common Fire Emblem strategies. That's your premise. One that makes plenty of sense. What I don't agree with is your conclusion; that the difficulty is well designed. It's one thing to take measures the nullify the effectiveness of common FE strategies. It's another thing to counter the utility of most of the classes/weapons in the game entirely. Like or not, the counter skill does this. You've acknowledged this to an extent in providing your rationale for using bow-classes on Luna+ runs. The design literally grossly limits the fashion in which you can reliably complete the game without exploits. You've offered multiple alternatives to bow-usage, but counter and the randomness mucks with all of them if you're not willing to grind and or/ soft reset alot.

Also, perhaps I misunderstand you, but the randomly distributed skills do limit strengths/weakness of the weapon triangle and special weapons to a great degree. An axe user with counter and/or hawkeye literally no-sells a sword's users weapon triangle advantages. Strategic reliance on most special weapons are greatly hindered by pavis+/aegis+. Not that I have a problem with bypassing the triangle and special weapon usage.

Telling me what I do or do not believe, is a great strategy for earning a one-way ticket to my Shit List.

Whoa there. It is not my intention to get on your "shit-list" or anyone's shit list for that matter, good sir, haha. I'd like to keep this discussion civil and apologize if you took offense to my comments. It's just that I don't think you believe in the implications of the "stop having fun guys" trope here. I demonstrated this via reductio ad absurdum. I gave an absurd example of implementing an optional way of making the game incredibly easy. You don't appear to agree that this is a good idea and with good reason. You provided us with an excellent anaology. An L+R/start-win method would make the game beatable for ALOT more people, but it's a waste of resources, optional or not. Making a game more accessible is fine, but it's not the only consideration when making video game.

In reality, none of the BS you described actually exists. If you're at the point where you have to justify your position by citing unicorns and fairy dust, consider the possibility that your argument isn't actually any good in the first place. There's no evidence of a slippery slope here.

I think there's been some miscommunication here. It's not about what exist and what doesn't nor whether there's a slippery slope it. It's about identifying a principal and acknowleding that just because something is optional and potentially makes thing more accesible, it doesn't mean it should implemented into the game. We agree that accessibility has its limits.

That's fascinating, since available evidence suggests otherwise.

Evidence which if taken seriously, would lead us to conclude that I don't want a lot of people to have fun, including those who'd like to have the ability to win entire chapters with the push of a button.

Not likely to get that out of a code monkey. "Developer" isn't some kind of universal currency like gil. You might have coders, artists, writers, managers, etc that can't necessarily be re-purposed for something outside their area of expertise.

Developers, coders, artists, writers or whatever applies here. The point is that the game was created on limited resources and that cutting back on one feature means more resources for another.

I can even use the accessibility/its-optional argument here.There are plenty of optional elements in the current game, but what if those optional elements were traded away for other optional elements? Would the game be better? Considering that there are no doubt a lot of people who would be much more inclined to play Fire Emblem if the storylines/characters were much better (some who have voiced their opinions in this very thread), this argument has grounds to stand on. Bioware, before they sold their souls to the EA devil, used to prove this with every one of their games.

The game already penalizes people who grind in the higher difficulties (to some extent), by limiting Spotpass/Risen returns. They wisely chose not to cause the shitstorm of the century by inhibiting people from using their paid DLC. We can safely stop right there without going further.

When I speak out against the element of grinding, I'm not simply suggesting that they cut-paste FE:A, but remove the grinding. Obviously, the game would need to be balanced around a lack of grinding. I'm talking about a system where grinding is more or less irrelevant. A good example of such a SRPG is Super Robot Wars (for the most part anyway). To its credit, Luna+ attempts to do this with skills like counter.

I respect your opinion but vehemently disagree with how Awakening went about things, but I also think it's an interesting discussion and something Fire Emblem as a whole (all games, really) need to improve on. Whilst I agree some of the characterization in Shadow Dragon was bad and thus you couldn't care for most of the cast, it's not a fair comparison as really, one has supports and the other doesn't. For me, Fire Emblem 12: Mystery of the Emblem is a much more even comparison.

I just can't take Fire Emblem Awakening's characters seriously as Gaius lays dying, worrying that he won't eat anymore sweets or Owain dying and blaming it on the fact he didn't give his weapon a cool enough name. Given there are instances of character development, don't get me wrong. It's just Awakening's characters are so disgustingly gimmicky and though people argue that it's been like this for every Fire Emblem, Awakening goes above and beyond to make characters as tropey as possible. Donnel's country gimmick, Severa being a tsundere, Tharja a yandere, Maribelle's condescending pride, Gaius's lolly addiction, Anna one-track mind on money, Nowi... well... Nowi. It's not like these characters don't get character development (although, let's be real like all of Fire Emblem games, some don't), we don't even get to see why they are who they are. Why is Anna addicted to money and Gaius sweets?

I completely agree that character development would be good - it's sad how Tear Ring Saga just demolishes Fire Emblem in this regard, so it's definitely not the way Fire Emblem presents it's story. But if we compare Awakening to Fire Emblem 12 and it's 'trope' characters, Norne the clutzy childhood friend of MU is someone who respects him and is hinted to like him. We see her motivation to join the army, to get stronger. Fire Emblem 12 digs into the deeper issues as well, Linde relating to the MU as they're both parent-less, Katarina's relationship with Kleine and her future away from the orphanage, Katria getting over her feelings, Arran's eventual death and heck, even Wrys's ideology about healing others and looking after children at the monastery.

Maybe Awakening could hit hard-hitting issues regarding or relating to the character, however Anna's unhealthy addiction to money won't be solved today, as the main thing the developers were focusing on with the My Unit talking to her is how they're going to do 4 conversations that ultimately end up with them marrying each other. With the introduction of My Unit, I think the conversations with the characters and My Unit are the most important, as it's meant to put you in the position of talking to the character directly and understanding them, Fire Emblem 12 at least succeeded in this to some extent, unlike Awakening. People have already mentioned in the past as other issues such as Coredelia's continual moping about Chrom despite being possibly married to someone else by the time. That's character regression if anything.

I also apologize as I haven't seen all supports in Awakening or Mystery of the New Emblem, so I may have missed out on things, etcetera.

You make some great points here and I wholeheartedly agree as far as silliness of FE13 is concerned. I've never played FE12, thus can't really comment on it. We seem to agree, however, that good characterization is a good way to enhance the series. Some of the death scenes are laughable even when its clear they shouldn't be and I could do without Olivia constantly talking about her dancing (even when the MU "dies", she's saddened that he/she won't get to see her dance anymore). The MU's sacrifice could've been handled a lot better. I would've made the death permanent. It's a big mistake to have a character killed off and resurrected if it doesn't come at a cost or at least a reasonable explanation. Here, we get neither. The MU just comes back at the end and everything is peachy.

That said, as far as the principle of making characters a little more than meaningless faces with one or two lines of dialogue, FE13 went in the right direction. The support conversations are one the best features in the series and I for one would like to see them further expounded upon. Maybe not to the extent of a Bioware game, but as a mechanism for fleshing out characters and giving us greater reason to keep them alive.

For grinding, I think the best thing to aim for is the pace is as perfect as possible without grinding, being easier on normal and harder on lunatic respectively. Using grinding to allow the player to make wanted adjustments to their difficulty is alright, as long as grinding isn't necessary for a fun experience. (and so far grinding hasn't be necessary, to it checks out). There's nothing I hate more when I'm playing something like Final Fantasy (though not specifically Final Fantasy, just the gameplay) and you need to go through grinding just to be able to beat it. But those games are almost set up so that you're forced tog rind before you get to where you need to be, and random encounters really annoy me after a while.

This is one thing I like about games like about Dragon Age Origins. Grinding is literally irrelevant since the enemies scale to your level and there are a set number of enemies in the game. Despite this, some enemies (i.e. bosses and elite level foes) are tougher than others and game is centered around besting your foes with strategy (hence the 'think like a general' tagline, inevitable exploits aside). I'm not suggesting level scaling, but if they could do something to balance FE in a similar fashion, I think that'd be great.

Edited March 8, 2014 by LightLelouch

[CT075]

reductio ad absurdium only works if the underlying principle doesn't get bastardized in the process of reducing it

Edited March 8, 2014 by CT075

[Czar_Yoshi]

Hoo, that's a massive post.

Shifting resources from one part of development to the next: No, Interceptor's right. You try telling your coders to add a new feature, and they'll do it and do it well. You try telling them to write some more story, and you get something like what Awakening has now.

Start button to win: In lower difficulties that's already kind of a thing...

[Constable Reggie]

One of the reasons that Lunatic+ is the way that it is, might be because the art assets required for it were relatively minimal.

But the new button graphics, man, the button graphics

[Czar_Yoshi]

Few new art assets is very different from no new art assets, because one requires an artist and one doesn't. In any case, my point wasn't that the art itself takes a lot of work, it's that so many things go into making something seemingly insignificant that often go unnoticed or unappreciated.

[Constable Reggie]

Have you seen the luna+ button? Must have taken them weeks to make just that alone.

[Emerald Ink]

To OP: Do you realize just how LITTLE game developers actually spend on writers and storytelling? And do you also have any idea of just how difficult storytelling in a video game is? Awakening is a text-heavy game, true, but I can almost guarantee that, from a development perspective, writers are considered some of the least important people on the team, even though they have some of the hardest jobs.

With video games, story is an afterthought. You can not sit down and bang out a script for a game - it just doesn't work like that. Before anyone even THINKS about what the story is going to be, they have to first go in and do all of the coding. This includes creating the mechanics, testing the mechanics, having artists create the models, having the models adapted into the game, testing the models to make sure that they don't break, testing the system for bugs, creating a second set of models for the cutscenes, making sure they animate properly, having a team of artists working to make sure that the game isn't an ugly mess in the background...you get the idea. Games don't start off with stories - they start off with ideas. With Awakening, the central idea was "What if the kids from the current members of your army came back from the future?" Thus, all the mechanics of the game were built around that.

Most of the time, writers are brought in extremely late in development. This is mainly because the bulk of any game's storytelling is done through its environment and its gameplay, so dedicated writers are not generally considered necessary until the script is almost all that's left to do. As such, writers are forced to create their script around the game, instead of what you seem to think happens where the game is built around a central script. When the writers get on board, all of the supports and conversations are already in place, and I don't think it would be too far fetched to say that the cutscenes are already mostly animated as well. Cutscenes are probably some of the first things to get scripts, since you then have to go and pay voice actors to read the lines, which can make the story even MORE disjointed since the intervening parts aren't necessarily fully fleshed out yet in terms of dialogue. I'd be willing to bet with Awakening, the reason most of the characters come off as "tropey" is because the writers weren't given a whole lot more than vague concepts to work with in terms of their character design. "He's a thief who likes sweets" or "She's clumsy and kind but also a little ditzy" or "She just wants to be normal and has an unrequited crush on her commander" isn't very specific, but it's also damned hard to build a character when that's all you have to go off of. And when you are literally trying to save a franchise from extinction, you can't afford to give ANYONE on your development team a lot of leeway to play around with anything that could be considered risky.

I don't think you understand exactly what demanding "better storytelling" of the developers entails. It means you're demanding a staff that is already under an insane amount of duress to dedicate time, money, programming, and other resources that they might not necessarily have. It doesn't matter if a writer has a great idea for a funny/cute/heartwarming/whatever support between secondary characters K and P, because it's not feasible for the team to go back and dedicate the time to go back into the code and mess with it and go through the whole process of making sure that, by trying to go back and edit in another support, they didn't just accidentally nuke the game or add in a bug that wasn't there before. This is especially true if there's not a lot of time left before development ends, which - as you recall I said earlier - there usually isn't by the time writers get brought on board.

Could the storytelling in Awakening be expanded upon? Hell yes. Could there be more support options available? I'd love that. But before you shove the writers under the bus, remember that they probably didn't have a hell of a lot to work with in the first place.

[TheWill]

You make some great points here and I wholeheartedly agree as far as silliness of FE13 is concerned. I've never played FE12, thus can't really comment on it. We seem to agree, however, that good characterization is a good way to enhance the series. Some of the death scenes are laughable even when its clear they shouldn't be and I could do without Olivia constantly talking about her dancing (even when the MU "dies", she's saddened that he/she won't get to see her dance anymore). The MU's sacrifice could've been handled a lot better. I would've made the death permanent. It's a big mistake to have a character killed off and resurrected if it doesn't come at a cost or at least a reasonable explanation. Here, we get neither. The MU just comes back at the end and everything is peachy.

I agree, I think the problem with Nintendo is they're afraid to handle more mature things, which explains the tropes that seem like they come from a rather generic anime. One thing that springs to mind is the conversation between Libra and Gaius - a support finally acknowledging that despite the people their killing are enemies, they're still human. This is an extremely serious conversation and I can understand why they'd want to 'fluffen' it, so to speak, but when Libra asks Gaius to pray with him, Gaius prays for candy? That ruined the entire conversation and chance of development for either. I also completely agree with the final ending, it would've been a great choice in the end, but you already explained the problems.

That said, as far as the principle of making characters a little more than meaningless faces with one or two lines of dialogue, FE13 went in the right direction. The support conversations are one the best features in the series and I for one would like to see them further expounded upon. Maybe not to the extent of a Bioware game, but as a mechanism for fleshing out characters and giving us greater reason to keep them alive.

I might have come off as unclear with my original post, but I do agree that even though their tropes, they do feel more like 'characters' compared to say an extremely large amount of characters in pretty much every other Fire Emblem game. In that aspect, the Awakening characters definitely showed improvements about being individual. I mean really, previously it was either about the characters stats or their looks as personality wise, they were non-existent. In that sense you explained, I'm glad they fleshed out characters more, however it just feels there's so many things to complain about them with what they fleshed out.

Assigning a single trope and making that character entirely abide and stick with that trope as their entire character is just such poor writing... Which is why I liked Fire Emblem 12's conversations, the characters weren't that developed, but they still had meaningful conversations pertaining to themselves with the My Unit. Similarly, the character development in Tear Ring Saga, where a lot of the characters were VERY fleshed out and had gameplay attributes unique to them. One such example is Raquiel, a promoted archer who had made a vow not to kill after participating in previous wars. Gameplay wise, she would never bring enemy units under 1HP despite being insanely stronger, however if you'd want to use her, there was a character related to her that initiated an event later on where he would get killed by an enemy unit in front of her, causing her to break her vow to not kill anyone and then proceed to work like any other unit. This is great development for a game that basically copies Fire Emblem gameplay to a very large extent. This coming from a game that didn't have support conversations.

To OP: Do you realize just how LITTLE game developers actually spend on writers and storytelling? And do you also have any idea of just how difficult storytelling in a video game is? Awakening is a text-heavy game, true, but I can almost guarantee that, from a development perspective, writers are considered some of the least important people on the team, even though they have some of the hardest jobs.

I enjoyed reading your perspective and opinion on Awakening's issues of character development and storytelling, as I do completely agree with you that a majority of video game developers don't spend as much time on storytelling as much as say, gameplay which makes perfect sense. Difficult? Well, it's their job and if Nintendo's not hiring experienced writers, well they're to blame... But anyhow, whether it's difficult or not something they didn't focus on is no excuse at all for the poor results presented. They are factors for us to help understand and accept the bad writing, but that doesn't change the fact the writing should be criticized heavily. It's not like the game is bad for having terrible writing in regards to character and story, as it makes up for it with gameplay and the like.

"He's a thief who likes sweets" or "She's clumsy and kind but also a little ditzy" or "She just wants to be normal and has an unrequited crush on her commander" isn't very specific, but it's also damned hard to build a character when that's all you have to go off of. And when you are literally trying to save a franchise from extinction, you can't afford to give ANYONE on your development team a lot of leeway to play around with anything that could be considered risky.

To be fair, I can see this being the case, but if the composer described their character as 'clumsy' and then 'a little ditzy', I'd probably fire them haha. This is a valid point though, the franchise wasn't in the best state thanks to the Tellius series, so they created characters to be as tropey as possible as it appeals to a pretty wide general audience and definitely the 'anime fanatics'.

I don't think you understand exactly what demanding "better storytelling" of the developers entails. It means you're demanding a staff that is already under an insane amount of duress to dedicate time, money, programming, and other resources that they might not necessarily have. It doesn't matter if a writer has a great idea for a funny/cute/heartwarming/whatever support between secondary characters K and P, because it's not feasible for the team to go back and dedicate the time to go back into the code and mess with it and go through the whole process of making sure that, by trying to go back and edit in another support, they didn't just accidentally nuke the game or add in a bug that wasn't there before. This is especially true if there's not a lot of time left before development ends, which - as you recall I said earlier - there usually isn't by the time writers get brought on board.

I'm sorry, but if the writers come in at the last second to write out a story that has only a base , then there's a really big problem both time management wise and communication wise. I honestly don't think the way you described it is the case for Awakening, a majority of characters are actually taken from extremely overused archetypes predominantly popular archetypes used in anime and manga. I think it was entirely intended for them to make the characters as tropey as possible as simply, that's what's popular with Japanese audience - however that's just a personal assumption. I mean really, the two most popular females are Severa and Tharja, speaking for themselves. Similarly, Chrom the epitome of blandness and Gaius the one-track candy king are the most popular guys. Either way, we can't say for sure on either case as they have not released any statements about time management - I think.

Of course, I do agree that time constraints are always a problem, just look at how badly they butchered Soul Calibur 5. But even then, is it really an excuse? Delay the game if you're missing out on a lot of the story. The way Fire Emblem Awakening done its supports pretty much gave it more free reign to develop characters more but instead tried to be more humorous and thus appeal to more casual players, which was definitely one of it and FE12's intentions.

[BANRYU]

IMO the biggest flaw with Awakening is the story. It has easily the weakest story of all the Fire Emblem games I've ever played, and I think the overcomplicated, Final Fantasy-esque plot devices play a big part in that. Most the other games had relatively simple worlds, setups, and plot devices that just utilized a lot of political intrigue and some plot twists to make an engaging story. Awakening just fell pretty flat in that regard.

But, not done that can be done to fix that without completely rewriting the game's script. I like the OP's idea of a FE4-esque time skip, but in general, I think there are so many possibilities on how to change the story that it would be impractical to discuss.

Son instead, here are my three easy steps to making this game passable on the mechanical level:

1.) Eliminate Grinding

I agree with the OP as to the principle, but not so much the execution. As much as I love Sacred Stones, I feel like it set some subpar standards for the series, among them the ability to grind which is fueled by the ability to free-roam on the map. An easy solution to the grinding problem is to disallow free-roaming on the map until the postgame. This would also help add an actual sense of urgency to the game's story that it's sorely lacking. _{(The ability to take a leisurely vacation to Valm while the plot wants your army to rush to the Dragon's Table as fast as possible is at least part of the reason why the game's story has little impact, IMO.)}

2.) Balanced Higher Difficulties

I pretty much agree with the OP on this one. I enjoy a good challenge meself; I love me some challenging-but-fair Megamanz, but I'm not touching Awakening's Lunatic mode. No bragging rights are worth that kind of misery.

3.) Fixing the Magic System

This was by far the simplest / most obvious to fix thing about the game. Why, when not so long ago we had the lovely elaborate double-triangle magic system from Radiant Dawn do we now go to just having Wind and Dark magic? Yeah, Fire and Lightning are in the game, but they're pointless since nothing is weak to them. That seems pretty unbalanced to me, and makes me wonder why they're even there at all if the Anima weakness triangle doesn't exist. That, and the fact that any magic-user can use any type of magic really lessens the impact of the different elements of magic even more. RD had a great system, why fix what isn't broken? (hell I don't even care that Light magic isn't in the game; it'd be nice, but most of the classes seem like they were designed without it in mind, so meh)

Easily fixed by doing this:

- Mages > specialized Fire / Wind / Thunder Mages

- Dark Mages / Sorcerers use only Dark Magic

- Sages use all three + staves, making them the only class to get all three

- Fire Mages upgrade to Sage or Dark Knight (Dark Knights wield Swords and Fire Magic)

- Thunder Mages upgrade to Sage or Valkyrie (Valks use Staves and Thunder Magic)

- Wind Mages upgrade to Sage or Darkflier (DF use Lance and Wind Magic)

- Tactician picks a type of magic to specialize in, then another one on promotion to Grandmaster for a total of Sword + 2 types of anima

- Beast units weak to Fire / Wyvern units weak to Thunder

(also have Pegasus Knights be only Flying / Wyvern Riders be only Wyvern; Griffon Riders being both Beast and Flying would be more unique that way)

It sounds more complicated than it actually is, but yeah. That's what I'd have done.

EDIT:

Of course, I do agree that time constraints are always a problem, just look at how badly they butchered Soul Calibur 5. But even then, is it really an excuse? Delay the game if you're missing out on a lot of the story. The way Fire Emblem Awakening done its supports pretty much gave it more free reign to develop characters more but instead tried to be more humorous and thus appeal to more casual players, which was definitely one of it and FE12's intentions.

I'd just like to say in response to this that time constraints absolutely are an issue in this field. I don't know the details of it myself, but everything has deadlines in the professional field, and you just have to work with what time you have.

Incidentally, while I regret that nearly all the effort in Awakening's script went into its very high-school-locker-room-esque supports, I think it's at least noteworthy to realize that this opens up the Fire Emblem series to a larger audience, meaning not only the survival of the series (it wasn't going to continue after Awakening if it didn't do well), but the possibility of greater improvements now that it's sort of hit the 'mainstream' among gamers. It may not have been as great as previous games, but at least there's that silver lining.

Edited March 8, 2014 by BANRYU

[eclipse]

I really feel as if you haven't read what I've written. I could write a lengthy response but everything I say seems to get lost because I'm not allowed to know enough to have an opinion.

You're free to have an opinion. . .and everyone else is free to criticize your opinion. I am not a fan of pity parties. This goes for everyone else in the thread (as an announcement). Now, then. . .back on topic.

Most of the characters had one personality trait that was done to death, and didn't vary much in supports. For contrast, Matthew has a bunch of supports, and in most of them, he's happy-go-lucky and somewhat sarcastic. . .until he supports Legault/Jaffar. Alas, one of the few Awakening convos that has that sort of turnaround is Gaius/Maribelle (and I really don't like having Gaius as Brady's dad, from a gameplay perspective).

In terms of gameplay, the only thing I'd do is make Javelins/Hand Axes available for purchase slightly earlier (namely, before the enemies start spamming them). It's a pet peeve of mine.

[Czar_Yoshi]

To OP: Do you realize just how LITTLE game developers actually spend on writers and storytelling? And do you also have any idea of just how difficult storytelling in a video game is? Awakening is a text-heavy game, true, but I can almost guarantee that, from a development perspective, writers are considered some of the least important people on the team, even though they have some of the hardest jobs.

While it's very true that time constraints are everywhere, I think you're getting a few different tasks confused. First off, the cutscenes: it's very difficult (not to mention a bad idea and waste of resources) to animate a CGI cutscene before you even know the story context it's taking place in, let alone the actual lines. There's also a difference between writing the story and writing the lines- the lines, as you said, are mostly done later on, but the story is worked on all the way from the beginning. Yes, perhaps Awakening is based on the concept of future children- but who came up with that, coders or storyboarders? There are other non-story things that can be held up by the story as well, namely map design.

The storyboarders are generally at work from the beginning, and while they can be pushed around by the coders/designers to a degree (which characters to and not to include- see KoI, there's a ton of units in the class artwork section that look like they could have once been intended to be playable), they do have control over things like the setting. The dialogue writers are the ones who are really pinched by this, they can try and try to make a good support list but there's nothing they can do if someone cuts a character and they have to trash a whole list of supports.

The main thing that happened during the storyboarding that messed up Awakening's story wasn't specifically time constraints- it was that Awakening was in danger of being the last Fire Emblem, they had multiple ideas for multiple games, and tried to do too much at once. Then they got hit by time constraints and couldn't make a 50-chapter game to properly expand upon all the elements, and it turned into the quantity-over-quality fest you see today.

[BANRYU]

The main thing that happened during the storyboarding that messed up Awakening's story wasn't specifically time constraints- it was that Awakening was in danger of being the last Fire Emblem, they had multiple ideas for multiple games, and tried to do too much at once. Then they got hit by time constraints and couldn't make a 50-chapter game to properly expand upon all the elements, and it turned into the quantity-over-quality fest you see today.

I was actually really hoping it WOULD have a huge amount of story chapters when I first got it, personally.

It's a shame it didn't work out, but maybe next time. *shrug*

Onward and upward, folks.

[Airship Canon]

Awakening's story problems come from it trying to do too much with too little to work with.

The main plot isn't critically bad. It doesn't fall apart completely, nor does it have any self-imploding issues like *Spends entire game to summon Dragons and is incapable of doing so**Suddenly summons dragons, ignoring everything else* that a certain other FE does. It's simply weak.

There's a lack of depth, which also brings in pacing issues.

There's weak villains because they don't get the time to develop.

It's like trying to use every character you get without grinding. It just won't work.

If you had more resources to go around it would though.

Which'd be the simplest solution to Awakening's story problems: Expand the hell out of it. If the game had ~60-ish main story chapters [the paralogues are fine] it'd be pretty solid, because you'd get more development storywise out of that than what happened with 27. Obviously getting that rams time constraints which'd be a catch 22, but that really just says the game should've been delayed a bit.

[NinjaMonkey]

- Wind Mages upgrade to Sage or Darkflier (DF use Lance and Wind Magic)

Since Dark Flier is female only, we end up with Female Wind Mages >> all other mages.

I thought that we were supposed to improve the game, not make it worse...

Edited March 8, 2014 by NinjaMonkey

[Airship Canon]

Since Dark Flier is female only, we end up with Female Wind Mages >> all other mages.

I thought that we were supposed to improve the game, not make it worse...

Or Dark flier goes Gender Neutral.

Which WOULD be an improvement, [ignoring the fact that the majority of the suggestions listed suck]

Mark that, Gender Neutrality in Classes. 'twould be a good thing.

The deal with Pegasus being adverse to males only is mentioned in Elibe, and FE3 Enemy PKs are male. [Also FE1/3 Dracos. Where'd they come from? That's a promoted PK. >_<;

And there's zero reason why a girl can't be a berserker.

Edited March 8, 2014 by Airship Canon

[BANRYU]

Since Dark Flier is female only, we end up with Female Wind Mages >> all other mages.

I thought that we were supposed to improve the game, not make it worse...

I just think it's funny that you didn't raise the same objection for the Thunder Mage > Valkyrie thing. > 3 >

Incidentally, I did realize that problem after I'd written it, though I'm inclined to agree with Canon that abolishing the gender-specificity in classes might not be a bad idea either...

But eh, what's done is done.

[Czar_Yoshi]

And there's zero reason why a girl can't be a berserker.

The costume and Awakening's track record with fanservice are reasons enough for me.

Assuming that wasn't an issue, however, I would quite enjoy Berserker x Berserker pairs...

One random suggestion: Troubadour should promote into Falco instead of War Cleric. That would expand passdown options for some units and generally make more sense.

[RJWalker]

Troubadour being female only makes zero sense since troubadours is used exclusively for males.

[tuvarkz]

Or Dark flier goes Gender Neutral.

Which WOULD be an improvement, [ignoring the fact that the majority of the suggestions listed suck]

Mark that, Gender Neutrality in Classes. 'twould be a good thing.

The deal with Pegasus being adverse to males only is mentioned in Elibe, and FE3 Enemy PKs are male. [Also FE1/3 Dracos. Where'd they come from? That's a promoted PK. >_<;

And there's zero reason why a girl can't be a berserker.

Or we could give Galeforce to Bow Knights. Historically, Gengis Khan's mounted archers were renowned for their capability to shoot while moving. It would also make Galeforce available to potentially any child (12 out of 13 would be able to have it)

[Czar_Yoshi]

The problem with that is that Chrom gets Bow Knight, and in a game so heavily biased toward lowmanning, giving Galeforce to the one unit who's always force-deployed, in a class that doesn't cause him to lose his weapon rank, seems like it would just make the problem worse.

Of course, I'm not saying that Awakening couldn't use some balancing of what classes get what skills, but there will always be broken classes and useless classes somewhere.