How is the new Fire Emblem?

[u/SaveADay89]

I'm a big fan of the fire emblem games, but I will admit that I didn't like engage. I found the combat to be as engaging as ever, but the anime tropes and characters were really annoying. I liked 3H, though. My issues is that I heard the new one is heavily skewed towards the out of combat activities, particularly the social features. Is this true?

[u/Ha_eflolli]

Because it's designed around fights being winnable without ever losing a single unit, the combat as a whole never feels dangerous.

Except it's exactly the other way around, the Games are designed around the assumption that you DON'T reset when you lose a Character. That's like, half the reason you still keep getting new Recruits even super late into the Playthrough; so that they can fill up any potential gaps you have from anyone getting killed off prior.

It's hard to get them to affect the story in any meaningful way because it branches out exponentially and becomes impossible to give each combination of events the writing it would need to feel well-written.

This one I'm purely adding to what you said, but it feels especially weird considering the Games already figured that shit out too, so it's not like those two states are mutually exclusive - Whenever a Non-Protagonist Character is too important to the narrative to outright remove when killed, they just say they got too injured to keep fighting going forward, so that they can still appear in Cutscenes while also getting removed from your Roster.

Although I will say, Path of Radiance actually DID do this, there's several Chapters in the Game where some Dialogue does actually differ depending on if specific Characters are still alive or not.

[u/EccentricFan → u/Ha_eflolli]

Except it's exactly the other way around, the Games are designed around the assumption that you DON'T reset when you lose a Character. That's like, half the reason you still keep getting new Recruits even super late into the Playthrough; so that they can fill up any potential gaps you have from anyone getting killed off prior.

I guess I haven't heard any interviews to speak to what they used for tuning/balancing the game, so you may be right. Though I'd wager very heavily that's an extremely uncommon way to play.

This one I'm purely adding to what you said, but it feels especially weird considering the Games already figured that shit out too, so it's not like those two states are mutually exclusive - Whenever a Non-Protagonist Character is too important to the narrative to outright remove when killed, they just say they got too injured to keep fighting going forward, so that they can still appear in Cutscenes while also getting removed from your Roster.

Although I will say, Path of Radiance actually DID do this, there's several Chapters in the Game where some Dialogue does actually differ depending on if specific Characters are still alive or not.

Yeah, it's an interesting problem that a lot of games struggle with when you get large rosters even if those members can't die. It's very common that many are optional recruits, and even if they aren't it can be hard to give enough focus to every member of the roster. It's a matter of opinion, but my favorite way to handle tactical games that need large numbers of units for gameplay is to just have generic units to supplement the roster. They don't need any lines, or to impact the story in any way beyond introducing the reason for having mercenaries, or summons, or whatever story excuse you have for them.

That allows balancing and gameplay design to require as large a roster as necessary while still allowing the story to stay focused on a smaller core of characters.

It shouldn't actually be necessary, since I'm seen plenty of games that use side characters of limited importance effectively. But it seems games with large rosters of playable characters have a strong tendency to mess it up. I guess it's probably me just being a lot less forgiving of shallow development when it's someone you're supposed to be spending a ton of time with during the game rather than someone you just run into occasionally.

[u/ThePowerOfStories → u/EccentricFan]

I really like the approach some games take of having multiple parallel teams to explain the cap on team size, align with time pressure in the story, and let you use all your units. So, I assign these folks to my A team and send them off to the deadly dungeon, those folks to my B team and play through the forbidden forest, and the new recruits plus a ringer white mage to operation kitten rescue to level up some.