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?

A black fly in your chardonnay

I was called upon to remark, recently, that I have played and finished Final Fantasys I, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, and X-2. Some observations arise with which to be dealt:

• First, how does one pluralize the proper noun Final Fantasy? Final Fantasies seems wrong, since the "ies" isn't part of the title. Final Fantasies looks a bit better, but still loses the y in the process of pluralization. I dunno, kids. I don't have all the answers.
• At 20 to 50 hours apiece, my total time playing these games--even excluding possible replays or restarts--would come to between 140 and 350 hours, with a median time of 245 hours, or about ten days. To put that into perspective, that's enough time to watch the Tenth Doctor's death scene nearly three times.

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

Suffice to say, my commitment to this series is not insubstantial. So why have I not played Lightning Returns, or its two weird prequels? How did I fall out of the series that defined Serious Gamerdom in the 16-bit era?

That would fall on Final Fantasy XII. I've probably put as many hours into FFXII as I have in more than one of the ones I've finished. Partially, this is because the influence of Final Fantasy Tactics encourages diversions and grinding to a degree that's extremely unusual for the fairly linear JRPG genre Final Fantasy epitomizes. Partially, it's because my life has been too chaotic for the sustained focus of a console JRPG for a while, and the complexity of the Tactics influences make it a difficult game to pick up in the middle.

But mostly, it's those damned licenses.

These fuckin' things.

FFXII gives the player a wide degree of latitude in terms of character design, and the characters' hardwired stat growth doesn't meaningfully bias them in any particular direction. On that basis, I let narrative be my guide, and built my team the way I interpreted them as having been written:

• Light armor, green magic, knives, crossbows, and ninjato for Vaan
• Magic armor, black magic, staves, rods, and measures for Penelo
• Heavy armor, spears, and axes for Basch
• Light armor, time magic, guns, bo, and bombs for Balthier
• Magic armor, arcane magic, bows, and katana for Fran
• Heavy armor, white magic, swords, and greatswords for Ashe
• with a bit of white magic for everybody, because a little goes a long way

There's a logic to these choices, and you can follow them on the license board. (Not the one I've posted, probably, but, you know. Try to stay with me here.) The weapon and armor choices seem to follow fairly straight lines, without a lot of wasted points. There's also some overlap in terms of weapon types: high damage with high damage, magic with magic, and high combo/critical with high-combo/critical.

Here's where it gets tricky. FFXII bears a strong influence from MMORPGs. It would be sensible to divide the characters into tanks, nukers/healers, and DPS, and the models described above fit that. Magic armor boosts max MP, so that's simple. Heavy armor, in addition to providing better raw defense stats, also boosts strength. Ok, that makes some sense, I suppose. Agility's usually more important for lightly armored high-damage classes, maybe light armor has a speed or critical bonus? No, light armor boosts HP.

1. If I may take a brief aside from this otherwise laser-focused post, I can see why having both HP and defense stats would make sense from a design perspective, but making them both variable by player action drives me mad, since they both do more or less the same thing. The differences--sometimes subtle, sometimes less so--can only be inferred by looking directly at the math. Fire Emblem, frustrating though it is on other issues, is admirably clear on how this works. X-Men Legends, a game with character growth that is elegant and delightful in every other way, is infuriatingly vague. The math gets a bit more complicated in FFXII, and since light armor and heavy armor provide defensive boosts through different stats, it's not particularly intuitive to weigh them against each other.
2. Light weapons benefit greatly from combos and criticals, which are enhanced as a character's HP % drops, which the HP bonuses influence...not at all, really? I suppose it makes the margin for a given enhancement slightly wider, but not terribly noticeably.
3. In practice, my fast characters never feel as effective as the rest of the team. I've tried putting heavy armor on them, in defiance of my beloved narrative tropes, and while I do appreciate the extra offensive capabilities, I quickly find myself missing the defensive properties of the lighter armor. This is weird.

It probably wouldn't meaningfully affect my play experience if I hadn't noticed it, but dammit, I can't stop noticing it, and every move on the lower half of the license board quickly becomes an exercise in self-doubt. Since self-doubt is roughly the opposite of why I play RPGs, I usually end up taking a break, and the rest is history.

The horrible, horrible irony of it--the rain on my wedding day, so to speak--is that writing this brought back a torrent of memories, and now part of my wants to boot the PS and start this monster of a game again.

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.