Harry Potter and the Emblem of Fire

I'm not sure why turn-based strategy games so frequently lack a difficulty setting between "Harlem Globetrotters" and "battle of Stalingrad," but it's something I've come to accept from the genre, and Fire Emblem certainly follows suit. My dawning awareness of this fact is the main thing I remember about my first experience with the series: alternating between easy, which felt less like a strategy game than an unusually long and condescending tutorial, and normal, which felt like playing chess when you never learned how to play, and also you're drunk, and someone keeps punching you in the face. I was reading Lord of the Flies at the time, working on an article about Bully and school shooting narratives--thank goodness THOSE aren't topical anymore--at my sister-in-law's place. Life was better, then. It had regular soda, and cigarettes.

The Sacred Stones was the my entry point into the Fire Emblem series, and the last game I remember purchasing for the Game Boy Advance. I'd spent more than fifteen years with the Game Boy and its variants, before the DS came along and perfected game consoles, so I suppose it's fitting that my final purchase was so memorable, but I don't remember what prompted me to buy it. I only know that right as I was starting to "get" it, I lost the damn thing somewhere in transit, and found it astonishingly difficult to replace without going to rather alarming expense. Fortunately, after a year or so of searching, a DS remake was released--Shadow Dragon, a remake of the series' premiere that I had missed--about which I wrote a mediocre and poorly proofed entry here.

I wasn't great at Shadow Dragon, but I feel like I understood it: learning to love the characters who'd be cruelly taken away from you for the simplest of mistakes, and learning to discard the worthless little shits who filled out the roster so the ones you cared about could survive. It wasn't built for long-term play, and even the hidden levels, while technically making the game longer (and exposing your characters to additional risk), were useful primarily because there simply weren't enough enemies in the game to sufficiently level everyone up. You couldn't play Shadow Dragon as an ongoing, infinite process. Everyone would die.

Awakening, of course, offers a choice on that front. Sort of. Sure it offers you the option to have "dead" characters taken away from you, as has traditionally been the series' wont, but they aren't dead. They're "retired." Not in the cool way, like in Blade Runner: their role in the story, if there is one, is unaffected. It kind of takes the piss out of permadeath when you can see the dead milling about at the craft services table between levels.

Nonetheless, losing soldiers to imaginary-death is uniquely galling, since Awakening goes on for-fucking-ever. The number of battles you can get into is literally infinite, and Nintendo will happily sell you additional ones in the e-Shop.

I find I miss the limitations more than anything. The reclass function never made any fucking sense--turn your deadly swordsman into a shitty, awkward knight!--but at least its existence pointed to a fundamental scarcity, that you weren't going to get many chances for a given class of combatant, and you'd goddamn better learn to appreciate them. The weapons followed suit. Sure, you could find an anti-cavalry axe somewhere, but anti-cavalry lances were plentiful, and delineated the superiority of armor over cavalry. (Even cavalry bearing anti-armor swords came at you from a point of statistical weakness.) Cavalry units were particularly limited and valued; in Awakening, nearly every class has a mounted variant, even the nerds, and while reclassing is more limited, it's also a hell of a lot more useful, and allows your characters to be leveled up infinitely.

Where scarcity remains, it's met with surfeit. "Rare" weapons present themselves with surprising consistency, to the point that it becomes hard to keep track. Due to the crucial finitude of nearly all weaponry, inventory management has always been annoyingly complicated in Fire Emblem; there's something perfectly compelling, and eternally frustrating, about a game that would be improved by removing one of the series' oldest and most consistent features. Then again, I guess that's how we got to Casual mode in the first place.

Fire Emblem is dead. Long live Fire Emblem. Just maybe don't make it quite so monogamy-oriented next time. In Shadow Dragon's multiplayer mode, I had an unstoppable squad of low-tier fighters with amazing stats, and do you know why? Because they supported each other emotionally, goddammit. To the tune of 45% hit and evasion bonuses. Awakening restricts relationship bonuses to one at a time, and an S-rank requires all-out hetero banging to achieve, so good luck forging an epic relationship between Virion and Kellam. Sure, you can do it, but you'll always be thinking, "this is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if I could make these two fuck."

Which I guess is how it feels to be a shipper, huh?

Fire Emblem and the Moral Meat Grinder

What's the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.

-Frasier Crane

I bought Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon during my partner's bout with Solidus Mononucleosis last year, and I've been playing it, with varying degrees of obsession, ever since. I've beaten it, of course, backwards and forwards. I've built an impeccable, unkillable squad for online play by exploiting a minor feature the online build guides seem to ignore. It's far from the best game of its genre, nor the best game in my personal possession, and yet I am compelled to continue.

I am so compelled because there are a number of choices in the game design that seem bizarre, that just barely miss the mark labelled "brilliant" and have to settle for "weirdly nonsensical." I find that these are the games that demand the most of my attention: not the ones I enjoy most per se, but the ones that would be perfect but for inexplicable design choice X. Or, in the case of Fire Emblem, design choices X, Y, and Z. (That Oxford comma was for you, Beth-Ann.)

The most unique feature of the Fire Emblem series, and the feature for which it is most famous, is as simple as it is profound. You see, when a character falls in combat--whether felled by sword, impaled by a javelin, or burned with eldritch magick--they die. And they stay dead. And with one very specific, late-game exception, they're of no use in future battles, because they're fucking dead and nothing can ever bring them back. I suggest you pause for a moment and think how interesting it is that this is such a rarity in this medium that we consider it a bold design choice. We even have a term for it: "permadeath." Out here in the really real world, we just call that "death."

Shadow Dragon has about 60 playable characters, all with names, histories, and unique growth statistics, along with a short epilogue describing what happens to them should they survive the game. (These epilogues are neatly sandwiched between the "epilogues" of the dead characters, who are "erased from the pages of history.") The result, from an emotive standpoint, can be quite striking: a particularly costly battle that wipes out ten characters you've spent many hours building up, characters who call out to their friends and families with their dying breaths, can feel a mite traumatic. Given the value placed on the unique and named in the tactical strategy genre, one might expect that the overriding ethic would be to be cautious and avoid gambling with the RNG, to take care to protect each and every soul in your army, accepting only the most modest losses in the most hopeless circumstances. One would not be dissuaded of this opinion if one checked the strategy guide, which suggests more or less this strategy. Nor would one be dissuaded by walkthroughs available online.

One would encounter difficulties later in the game, though, because it turns out that this pious, humanistic strategy is utter bullshit, and will completely fuck you over by around Chapter 20. Because there are around 60 unique playable characters in Shadow Dragon, but there aren't nearly enough enemies around to level all of them up. (The hint guide recommends equipping the weakest weapons possible, and keeping opponents alive for as long as possible so your soldiers can use their living bodies for fencing practice. Try, for a moment, to narrativize this scenario.) So some of your dudes are going to have to go un-leveled. However, when your army drops below a certain number, scabs are brought in--characters without identities, whose experience and abilities are determined by an average of the surviving members of your party. So that poor Lv.3 kid you picked up fleeing the ruins of his hometown? Not only is he not helping, but he's actively making your job harder merely by being alive. In addition, those unique growth stats have a lot of variance: Altea truly is a land of natural masters and natural slaves.

As you've probably figured out by now, the optimal strategy in Shadow Dragon--I cannot, for the moment, speak of other Fire Emblem games--is to identify the heroes in your party, and throw the wretches in front of them should your enemies loose an arrow in that direction. Four hidden levels, each containing a powerful ally and most containing valuable rare items, are only accessible if you keep the total roster from climbing above fifteen. For me, this invariably requires me to intentionally send five or six souls to their gruesome, pointless deaths on the level prior to the check-in. I can think of no narrative reason to fanwank this blood sacrifice, but dammit, I want that sorcerer.

This strategy is, perhaps, more appealing to some than others. On a message board discussing the brilliant Battle for Wesnoth, I read a complaint from a player who found themselves unable to complete most of the campaigns, because they could keep no experienced troops alive for the duration. This player was presumably a devoted adherent to the meat grinder strategy, protecting a hero who could not be arsed to actually engage in combat with a constantly reinforced wall of human bone and sinew. Wesnoth, perhaps, takes its priorities to the other extreme. The more battle experience a unit acquires, the more suicidally risky it becomes to allow them to engage in battle.

But then, I suppose that's not significantly more insane than how these things have worked in real life.