Recently I was thinking about its iconic permadeath rule: if one of your units dies in battle, you'll never get them back. Only the handful of protagonists must be kept alive to progress. Otherwise, no character's survival is necessary in order to complete the game. Growing up, I recall this being the one thing Fire Emblem was known for, the source of its brutal reputation.
Here are two seemingly-conflicting facts about it:
1) The game has several major design decisions that assume the player will accept a character's death and march on forward in spite of it. For example, they continue to introduce new characters all the way through the penultimate chapter, clearly intended to "replace" characters you may have lost up to this point (e.g. "better grant them a light-magic user at the 11th hour, just in case their other light-magic users died at some point!").
2) Almost nobody on Earth plays that way. The almost-universal norm for vanilla playthroughs of old Fire Emblem games is to reset the chapter the moment a character dies. That's just... how it's done.
What's with that?
Raging against the dying of the light
I always felt like players refusing to accept permadeath were being big babies. That's a part of the game! It's one of the most critical elements of its design! You're rejecting an intended part of the experience!
And yet... I also conformed to that same norm during my own playthrough. And I've been reflecting on my rationale for that.
The common explanation is that, because every character has a name and a story, that's what makes their deaths painful, right? If they were nameless, faceless mooks, like in Advance Wars, then it's pretty easy to say goodbye to units when they perish. Like, obviously it's harder to accept a game unit's death when they've been humanized. Literally everyone knows this.
But I began to second guess that explanation. Is that really why I kept resetting my game whenever my pegasus knights got killed?
As I played through the campaign, there were several points I asked myself "under what circumstances would I permit myself to continue playing after a character died?" Let's run through a few options:
- If the character was a part of my "endgame death squad," the handful of units I'd been investing as much XP into as possible in preparation for the final chapter, then definitely not. But no part of that rationale is humane. It's entirely pragmatic. I'm not sacrificing assets that valuable, especially because you can't make up for those losses later.
- If they were some schmuck who I don't care about, then maybe I'd be fine with it? Like, I guess if Dorcas died, I could bring myself to just finish the chapter and move on. But I wouldn't be bringing along those characters anyway. Certainly not in the latter half of the campaign, when you need to fill every character slot with someone who really matters.
- If it seemed appropriate? Like it was a "worthy" death.
It's that last one that got me really thinking. Can I imagine such a situation where a unit's death would "feel right"?
This is a strategy game...
The most obvious idea would be if they get sacrificed, allowing for a greater victory. But that sort of thing just doesn't really happen in Fire Emblem (in my experience). You never get that Chess scenario of forming a play that requires you to sacrifice your own queen in order to clinch the checkmate, y'know?
Another idea is if a chapter is so difficult that one or more characters dying is guaranteed. A brutal meat grinder of a level, where it's just mathematically impossible to outpace the rate of unstoppable incoming damage with your healing efforts. But again, that situation just doesn't exist in Fire Emblem. Every single chapter is possible to clear with no deaths, usually pretty easily.
In fact, every time I ever lost a unit in Fire Emblem, it was because I blundered. I did something stupid that resulted in their death. And, personally, having to live with the consequences of your own stupidity is one of the more painful regrets to carry.
Even more than that, let's not forget that this is a challenge-oriented game. This is a campaign about being a strategist, after all. Choosing to continue playing despite having lost a character because of a stupid mistake also feels like you left the puzzle unsolved. You know there was a way to do that chapter "right," so how can you move on? You may have "beaten" the chapter, but in your heart you know you didn't truly beat it.
Of course, this is an entirely self-imposed standard, right? Insisting on beating the level "perfectly" is an extra level of difficulty that you only force on yourself. Like collecting 100% of the optional golden pine cones. Certainly it would be easier to just accept a death here or there, instead of re-playing the chapter again and again until you've beaten it the "right" way.
Except that, after enough character deaths, this will actually make the game significantly more difficult. You may have been able to beat that chapter without Priscilla, but are you ready to beat every chapter for the rest of the game without her? In fact, it's hypothetically possible to softlock yourself if too many of your high-level characters die too late in the game, because you won't have the time to train up any suitable replacements for them. And trust me, there's no replacement for Priscilla.
As a strategist, you're not just solving the puzzle presented by each chapter, but also the greater puzzle of the campaign itself. And that tends to demand some excruciatingly high standards.
…and this is a story
Even aside from all that, I also feel like it's impossible for a unit dying in-battle to ever "feel right," for reasons entirely unrelated to gameplay.
Everyone knows that the primary appeal of Fire Emblem isn't the strategy. It's the blorbos. Those loveable colorful-haired characters you want to see kiss. Each one gets a little plotline for you to follow over the course of the game (although the limitations on the Support mechanic in FE7 were annoyingly harsh, in my opinion). Rebecca is searching for her long-lost brother! Will she ever find him?? Play to find out!
(I would also argue that "blorbo attachment" is not the same as humanizing characters. In many ways, it's extremely objectifying. So I maintain my stance that "players don't let their units die because they see them as people" is an insufficient explanation)
Each blorbo's story is told through cutscenes between chapters, cutscenes using the "Support" mechanic, and most importantly, in the post-game epilogue. Therefore, if a unit dies in battle, then you never get to experience their full story. You're always aware of the "right" ending that you've robbed yourself of by allowing them to die before their time.
Of course, stories are malleable. Most characters even have multiple possible epilogues for you to unlock. One could argue that a character dying in battle is a valid ending for their story, right? We've all had that experience of playing a game and feeling like a moment was so perfect it could almost have been scripted, even though it wasn't. Or even in a game with generic units, like Advance Wars, there's one that's managed to stick around so like that you've grown attached to them, seeing them as the hero of their own story.
But what if there are scripted moments, and there are designated heroes? Therein lies the central tension I want to interrogate.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
Yeah yeah go ahead, point and laugh, he said the thing. I'm sure this means I owe some kind of lame internet tax for being pretentious or something.
This concept rests on the notion that the very act of play itself generates a story on its own, typically unscripted and relying a lot more on interpretation than other, more conventional storytelling means. It's a story told using only the nouns and verbs of the game's mechanics. The dissonance comes from when this "emergent narrative" clashes with the scripted narrative told through cutscenes and dialogue and whatnot. Aligning the two instead produces "ludonarrative harmony" (or as they say in the M:tG community, a "flavor win"), which is aesthetically satisfying.
But in this case, I'm unsure how one could reconcile the two elements to create that harmony. A unit dying in gameplay can never feel dramatically appropriate as a story beat because so much of the rest of their story is being told through other means. It doesn't feel valid if it doesn't take place in a cutscene. But not merely because cutscenes are somehow "more satisfying" than the battle animations. They feel more authoritative. The non-gameplay storytelling always trumps gameplay in the mind of the audience.*
Let's contrast this with, say, Final Fantasy Tactics. I haven't played it, but my brother (who is very well-acquainted and is currently playing the new Switch version) was telling me about it recently. In that game, a big chunk of your party is comprised of generic normie units that you recruit from a random generator. So you'd think they'd be closer to the mooks of Advance Wars than the blorbos of Fire Emblem, right? Except that when they're generated, they each get a name, individualized stats, and a birth sign (which, yes, is relevant to gameplay). And in the new port, they're even voice acted, with multiple voices for each gender! Between all these elements, I can imagine that these "generic" units can easily possess a blorbo appeal.
Because these characters have no scripted cutscenes and dialogue, the only story that exists for them is the one told through the gameplay. All of their dramatic potential has to be constructed in your own imagination. It's entirely possible that sacrificing one in battle could totally feel like a "correct" ending for them. But of course, you're missing out on a lot of dramatic conventions that tend to really enhance a narrative. I might begin to mentally construct a story for Generic Unit Bob after using him in many battles, but his story will never have something as uniquely compelling as Rebecca's search for her long-lost brother, or Sain's constant unsuccessful attempts to hit on women, or Matthew's secret status as a spy and the tragedy of losing his spy-girlfriend to the bad guys (yes, in a cutscene).
Perhaps a better example of the potential of emergent storytelling is, obviously, Dungeons & Dragons (and other analogue imagination games). When you play D&D, you hand-craft blorbos set up for individual, dramatic stories. But those stories are also (typically) entirely emergent from play.
Unlike in Fire Emblem (or any other video game), there doesn't exist the same clash between gameplay and other means of building a narrative, because almost everything in the game is conveyed through one medium of transmission: conversation. And mediating a narrative via conversation has infinite dramatic potential, because it's a process that's entirely open-ended and takes full advantage of our collective imaginative power.
So we can experience a story as rich and special as the scripted cutscenes of a video game, but without needing them to be pre-programmed ahead of time. We craft them on the fly, always running with the emergent story generated by the gameplay rather than overruling it.
But what happens when a player character dies during combat in D&D? Sometimes it feels like a fitting end to their story. But many times it doesn't. Players often express frustration and disappointment with such an outcome. Not just because they failed the challenge, but more often because it feels like a bad ending to their story. Yet unlike in Fire Emblem, there's no "canon story" for your PC that you're now going to miss out on. There's no definitely real version of the story that you can compare it against. There's only ever the "hypothetically superior" version you were imagining.
And even then, skilled players and GMs can work together to make an unexpected outcome feel more narratively satisfying in hindsight. Or you may learn to dwell in the feeling of being dissatisfied, reflecting on how the game inevitably produces outcomes that fail to enforce the conventions of drama. Either way, it's a lot harder to characterize any gameplay result as "wrong" under these conditions.
Can Fire Emblem have its cake and eat it too?
I'm unsure, but my gut tells me the answer is no. Every suggestion I've heard or come up with myself would seriously compromise one of the two main desired components of the Fire Emblem experience. Later games prioritized the blorbo appeal, but they turned off the permadeath to achieve this. Something like Final Fantasy Tactics gets away with "narratively satisfying permadeath" by not having bespoke characters each with their own scripted storyline.
There are a lot of really interesting possibilities with how to change up the formula (including a couple they actually toyed with in a few entries, from what I hear). But the thing here that's captured my interest is just the unexpected tension between these two pillars of the franchise. That no matter how I play Fire Emblem 7, I will feel like I'm denying myself some essential part of the experience.
-Dwiz
*When I was in college, I wrote a paper for a Cultural Studies class where I tried to articulate this idea by citing Stuart Hall's encoding / decoding theory. From memory, Hall asserted that it's possible to identify a dominant moment in the process of meaning being encoded and then decoded, from sender to receiver, which defines the work's meaning more fully than the other moments.
I recall his framework mostly discussing this in a sequential way, but I wanted to argue that we can also view this process "from the side." Because something like a video game encodes meaning through multiple different mediums of transmission (e.g. gameplay, visuals, music, dialogue, etc.), we can likewise identify which medium within that process is the "dominant moment" that characterizes the work as a whole. Here I argue that the meaning encoded and decoded in cutscenes is more dominant than the emergent meaning that one might decode from the gameplay.
But I did not get a very good grade in that class and it was many years ago, so maybe I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about.
I recall his framework mostly discussing this in a sequential way, but I wanted to argue that we can also view this process "from the side." Because something like a video game encodes meaning through multiple different mediums of transmission (e.g. gameplay, visuals, music, dialogue, etc.), we can likewise identify which medium within that process is the "dominant moment" that characterizes the work as a whole. Here I argue that the meaning encoded and decoded in cutscenes is more dominant than the emergent meaning that one might decode from the gameplay.
But I did not get a very good grade in that class and it was many years ago, so maybe I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about.
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