swords in cyril

Fire Emblem started as one of the earliest examples of a Simulation RPG (or Strategy RPG in the west, but, you know). it was trying to take a wargame framework and apply that to a fantasy rpg. so unlike most wargames, every unit has a name, personality, and unique attributes. but unlike most rpg's, you're moving across a battlefield. units are defined by wargame functions, like "ranged," "high movement," "flying," etc. and if one of your allies dies, they're gone for good. it creates an emotional heft, one found in most games with permadeath. to quote jon bois, who's talking about a different game, but i think it's relevant here:

"the genius of xcom 2 is that it immerses you via accountability. if your ranger dies, you are left with a feeling that ultimately, they counted on you to lead them, and that even in a game that is often decided by chance, it was all your fault"

in a way, fire emblem simulates war in a way that a lot of wargames don't. it makes you care about each of your units, not just because they're unique characters with lives, but because losing them means losing what they did for the army. you only get so many healers in fire emblem, so many thieves who can open a chest, and if you trained someone up for ages just to see them die to a random critical hit, it hurts.

or at least, that's how it works in theory. in reality, most players will just restart the chapter if they lose someone important. strict "ironman" rules have never been implemented in fire emblem, so while theoretically this is a game about living with your mistakes, in practice it's about constantly redoing a fight until you get the right results. modern fire emblem has even made rewinding to specific moments an actual game mechanic, a design choice i call "embracing the bastards." (i say this with affection, i am one of those bastards)

to make up for the fact that you can lose characters, you get a lot of them over the course of the game. a lot of these characters, especially in early FE, are just kind of there. like, you get so many characters of the same class who are clearly just backup if the other ones die. some of these units are great, with amazing stats or the ability to use some cool weapon, and others suck. if you talk to fans of "classic" FE, you'll find that a lot of people's favorite characters are decided by gameplay. as the series progressed, characters grew to be more fleshed out narratively and more balanced mechanically depending on who you ask, so a lot of modern fans are more into a character because of their personality or character arc.

which does lead us into talking about how the series has shifted over time. because when people think of "fire emblem" now, they're not thinking about the games from the 90s. they're probably not even thinking about the games from the 2000s. so let's talk about the changing identity of fire emblem. i like to split this into four "eras," broken up by major mechanical changes and shifts in who's leading the charge. i'm sure some fe fans will disagree on on this, but this is the framing the works the best for me. so!

The Kaga Era: This was an era of fire emblem led by a single guy, Shouzou Kaga. this is, i feel, where the essence of Simulation RPG is felt the most strongly. the games are hard to get into these days if you don't already play fire emblem, but there's a real artistic commitment here to trying to capture ideas through mechanics. aside from FE1 introducing the major concepts, we also got Gaiden, which leaned way harder into the RPG angle with monsters to fight, a robust magic system, and the ability to walk around in dragon-questy towns. we got Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to the first game that put familiar characters in new contexts. we got Genealogy of the Holy War, an incredibly ambitious game that tells a story of war on a massive scale, and features massive battlefields where often multiple factions will be fighting with their own distinct goals. we got Archanea Saga, a very a short game consisting of four incredibly potent one-shot chapters, fleshing out the interim between FE1 and Mystery. and we got Thracia 776, a midquel to Genealogy, but an intensely challenging game left so up to randomness that anything can happen. some oldheads view Thracia as the height of the series.

The Renaissance: After Kaga left due to a squabble with Nintendo that is its own story, the Fire Emblem dev team had to pick up the pieces without its auteur director. This period is arguably when Fire Emblem was most "itself." The Kaga era was foundational, but too experimental to have a consistent identity. The Renaissance was when the idea of what A Fire Emblem Game was solidified. If you ask a lot of people who were fans before 2013 what they think of when they think of Fire Emblem, you'll probably get something from this period. Probably the biggest innovation from this era was the Support Conversation. Basically, if you put two characters next to each other for long enough, they might strike up a conversation with each other. You can usually do this two more times. This fleshed out the characters beyond their first impression, and made personality more of a sticking point.

You could maybe argue that this period was intensely safe, but I'd say after Kaga's departure, safe was probably necessary. Binding Blade was essentially a rehash of FE1, with its general structure, appeal, and issues. Blazing Blade, a prequel to Binding, was the first FE game to be released outside of Japan, so it featured an extensive tutorial, and was generally a lot easier, but also featured some really solid and creative level design which means I can recommend it even to this day. Sacred Stones did similar to Gaiden with its skill system, extensive class system, and monster grind battles. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn... I actually haven't really played this game or heard much about it but a lot of people view them as the height of the series. And Shadow Dragon was a remake of FE1, that actually tried very hard to encourage you to ironman it. You can reclass characters however you like, and if your army is small enough you get generic replacement units, both of which reduce the punishment for letting units die. Some bonus units are only available if you have a small army. And the prologue ends by forcing you to choose someone to sacrifice. Unfortunately, it was my first FE game, and I still reset whenever someone died. Caeda, my beloved.

The Maeda Era: This starts, oddly enough, with a remake of the third game, New Mystery of the Emblem. This game covers the same story of Mystery, but with some new additions. There was now a customizable player avatar to embody You, you could listen to support conversations, (i know they're not called that in that game, shut up) which you couldn't do in the original, a new plotline about assassins was added, and crucially... There is now a Casual Mode. Yes, you can now start the game choosing between either Classic Mode, which has permadeath, and Casual Mode, which doesn't. This fundamentally changes the FE experience, as you can imagine, and it's still a pretty contentious topic within the FE community. A lot of new players struggle to get into classic Fire Emblem because the forced permadeath is just too punishing for them. But it's also core to what the Fire Emblem series was trying to do. It was contentious within the dev team, too, with people fighting over whether or not to include it. Ultimately, it was decided that if the FE series was going to survive, it would need to be more playable to a casual audience.

This leads us into Fire Emblem: Awakening, which was a massive success compared to anything else in the series before then. It featured the player avatar and casual mode, and really leaned into the support conversation system. It even combined this with the marriage and children system of Genealogy, adding a fourth support level, "S," which got characters to marry and have a child, who would travel back from an alternate timeline to fight alongside you. You could even marry someone with your player avatar. This did make Awakening more dating sim than tactics game in some people's eyes, but it really helped give the game a fandom that exceeded the existing FE fandom by a longshot. This kind of design was continued with Fire Emblem Fates, a game that was actually three different games you could choose between, that would have you fight on different sides of the war. Birthright was basically more Awakening, but Conquest took that paradigm and made it into a focused, polished, and designed tactical experience. (Arguably overdesigned, I don't like it that much but I get why people do.) And the Maeda era ends with Fire Emblem Heroes, a mobile gacha game with enough creativity as power creep. And really, how else could this end?

The Modern Era: Since Maeda is mostly working on Heroes now, we're in a similar situation to the Renaissance, where the series has to pick up where its leader left off. But instead of playing it safe, the new directors have experimented in a way we haven't seen since Kaga. It started, of course, with a remake of Gaiden, called Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I have a soft spot for this game, but the major things it introduced are 1) full voice acting, 2) active skills which mean you're actually choosing moves with unique effects and not just weapons, and 3) turn rewinds, which finally just makes resetting a deliberate game design tool.

From this point on we have Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which did a similar split-path framework to Fates, but instead of choosing based on gameplay, you choose a path based on which characters you personally want to spend the game with. (Although you can recruit other characters.) I think its gameplay is a really nice synthesis of a lot of different mechanical influences, but that's not really why people care about Three Houses. People care about Three Houses because it features a hot girlboss voiced by Tara Platt, a school setting that's easy to project onto, multiple queer characters with subtext for each other, and a morally grey set of factions that people can argue passionately about for years. It is THE fandom-ready Fire Emblem game. After that is our most recent game, Fire Emblem Engage. Now, this is structured like a traditional FE game, but it plays pretty substantially different, because of its Engage system, where your units can summon past FE protagonists to give them massive power buffs and let them execute a hugely powerful special move. My favorite is the one that lets you rush through as many enemies as there are in a straight line. It's also incredibly anime, like bright colors, power of friendship, character designs just a little too outlandish. It's great if that's your shit.

so, I've been talking a lot about how these games play. and if you're a big fan of these games, especially of the modern ones, that might frustrate you. you don't play rpg's for the combat, you play them for the story, which i have avoided talking about for the most part. and first of all, that's a very reductive way of looking at rpg's, and games generally. second, these things are intertwined, you cannot disconnect story from play. but third, i'm of the mind that what a game is About is decided by what happens when you interact with it. talking solely about what happens in cutscenes and dialogue is treating a game as something to watch or read, not as something to play. and i think we owe it to ourselves, and the medium, to do better than that.