Influence of the Avatar's existence on game mechanics

[Bovinian]

First of all, this is not a topic discussing how overpowered the MU is as a unit, but rather how the existence of a self-insert character may indirectly affect game mechanics that would seem to have nothing to do with the MU on the surface.

So I've been playing through the older games and really appreciating how much depth the Rescue and Shove commands bring to the series in terms of strategic options. Since Awakening was the first original title to be released after Radiant Dawn (which imo was a great culmination of the series' mechanics by its time), I wondered what could possibly have prompted the devs to remove so many of the strategic options available to the player, especially when it was supposed to be a celebration of the entire series.

While I may not necessarily agree with the decision, I can get behind the devs wanting to remove Rescue when Pair Up exists, especially since the former would be seen as a vastly inferior option to the latter (this isn't necessarily true because of Rescue-dropping, but they clearly intended to hype up Pair Up as this amazing new mechanic so yeah). How about Shove? Maybe the devs specifically intended it to be something niche to the Tellius series, but it is a very useful command and is extremely intuitive for even the most casual player so I see no reason why they should've gotten rid of it.

Which brings me to the Avatar discussion. Shove relies on constitution (it differed a little between PoR and RD) to work, and Awakening's units lack this property. I guess it could have been reworked so anyone could shove anyone, but that would remove a lot of the strategical aspect. This then got me to wonder why constitution (which has existed in essentially all the games besides the older ones if I'm not mistaken) was removed in the first place. And then I got this crazy thought that maybe it was because of the self-insert MU.

The Avatar system has been done in two ways that we know of so far (we don't know the details of customization in FE14 yet). From the little I've played of New Mystery, I think I remember that your appearance was customizable but your build (i.e. how big you were) wasn't, so there would be no way for the game to assign your character a set constitution/weight without breaking immersion for some people. In Awakening, there are three distinct builds that could have theoretically been assigned Con values going off their appearance. The problem with this, though, is that it makes your gameplay experience differ depending on what you look like (Asset/Flaw have nothing to do with aesthetic customization). It might have ended up introducing a situation where, for example, big people are strictly better at beating the game than small people, which the devs would likely want to avoid.

There might be other examples similar to this, but constitution was the one that first came to mind and seems to be consistent with the removal of certain mechanics that imo were good for the series. What do you all think?

Edited April 25, 2015 by Bovinian

[Czar_Yoshi]

Whether or not weight is even a good thing is already a pretty controversial topic. I think it's gone because it's just another calculation and the devs wanted to remove it to make the game more accessible.

[Bovinian]

I meant constitution/unit weight instead of weapon weight (is unit weight only a thing in RD? my bad). As far as I know, there are no real calculations associated with constitution except for calculating AS loss in some of the games, which I won't get into here. I was trying to bring up how the lack of Rescue and Shove, two commands that rely on Constitution to work and are not necessarily difficult to comprehend, coincide with the lack of the Con stat in the most recent games, and how the MU might be tied to the lack of Con as well as its associated strategies.

Will replace the word 'weight' with constitution in my original post so it isn't mistaken for weapon weight.

Edited April 25, 2015 by Bovinian

[Czar_Yoshi]

No, it's in the GBA games as well. It's just never served a purpose other than Rescuing (you covered why you don't think this is in Awakening) and weapon weight outside of Tellius.

[sirmola]

Heck, because weapon weight is mitigated by strength in telius anyway, constitution does 3 things:

1. Rescue

2. shove

3. the "colossus" skill

Rescue got replaced by pair up, so i can see the developers not wanting to have an entire stat for two extremely niche things.

That being said, they probably could have made in based on strength or something had they really wanted to. The removal of shove feels more like them trying to trim unnesesairy complexity (even if it was a fun mechanic). This is probably also why the tanguel use stones instead of a guage, or why biorythems got turned into much simpler skills.

[Epic10is321]

Pair-up added a new dimension to the fire emblem games. Since Awakening was supposed to be the last fire emblem game the developers wanted to try some new stuff out. It probably didn't make sense to include both shoving/rescuing and the pair-up mechanic.