So one thing that I’ve noticed about the Fire Emblem series is that most games have a difficult time coming up with a thought-provoking game that challenges and mentally stimulates the player. Fire Emblem games, for the most part, are either too easy or too difficult. If you’re a masochistic tryhard you’re more likely to believe the former, if you’re a noob or just an average player then you’re more likely to believe the latter. Most Fire Emblem games do not have balanced difficulties.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Awakening. Awakening has the worst difficulty curve of the entire series to date. “Hard” mode is really easy unless you create self-imposed challenges on yourself while Lunatic mode scares the living crap out of most Fire Emblem players. It gets even worse when you take Lunatic + into consideration. In Lunatic + enemies are randomly alloted and assigned OP skills, some of which are exclusive only to them. This is not how you make a good difficulty curve. In my opinion, Lunatic mode should have been the most difficult of the difficulty settings and there should have been a difficulty setting set between Hard and Lunatic.
My personal philosophy on how this should be done is that the game should be thought about like a puzzle. Puzzles, when properly done, can be challenging and can require thought and effort on the part of the player. Give the player all the pieces and expect them to figure things out. The best puzzles are ones that are neither too easy nor too difficult. They hit that perfect sweet-spot where the player can be pushed without having to resort to RNG shenanigans.
Most Fire Emblem games traditionally increase the difficulty in 2 ways: They increase the enemy’s stats and they increase the number of enemies that the player has to deal with. These approaches make sense, but I believe that there is more that can be done to make games more challenging.
I have a list of ideas and thoughts that could help make future Fire Emblem games become challenging, yet also fair at the same time. The following are a list of suggestions and proposed solutions that I’ve come up with:
- Limit the resources at the player’s disposal: Most Fire Emblem games give the player way too much money. This means that the player is never in any real danger of running out of weapons and it takes away from the strategy that limited weapon durability is supposed to give.
This problem is further exacerbated by the existence of promotion items. Promotion items can be sold for a lot of money. During my last Sword of Seals run I ended up with over 100,000 gold. A significant percentage of that money came from sold promotion items. I didn’t use a single Knight’s Crest throughout the entire game. According to serenesforest.net you get 5 Knight’s Crests total which means that if you sell them all that’s 50,000 gold right there. That’s a crap ton of money for a Fire Emblem game! I also only used 1 flier (Miledy) so there’s another potential 40,000 gold just from selling Elysian whips. Of course, we haven’t even gotten into all the gold that this game dishes out in the form of red gems or all the straight-up money you can receive from treasure chests. More money means more weapons or stat-booster items which equals an easier game.
This also applies to forges. Limit the number of forges a player can make per chapter and increase the cost of forges themselves. Fire Emblem 12 is the poster child for both forges and limiting the resources at the player’s disposal. It gives you enough, but you still have to manage it wisely or else.
- Give enemies access to everything that the player has: Pretty self-explanatory. If there’s a skill system in a game then give enemy access to skills too. The catch here is not to make those skills overpowered (Hawkeye, Luna + and the Awakening version of Counter can all die in a burning pit) while also making them have a meaningful impact on the game. If the game is using a Pair-Up system then let the enemies have access to Pair-Up too (like in Fates). Give the enemy support bonuses too. In most game where support bonuses are available they often add some pretty powerful bonuses to the player’s units so giving this to enemies should help make the enemies stronger too.
- Vary the map objectives: Believe it or not, switching up the map objectives could help make the game more difficult in a unique way. Games that have the same objective lead to very simple strategies most of the time. Varied objectives call for varied strategies. For example, one of the maps in the Fire Emblem game that I’m trying to make has a defeat condition that states that if the entire enemy army is routed it’s game-over for the player. This means that you can’t simply increase the stats of the enemy and increase their numbers in order to make the map more difficult. In fact, doing the exact OPPOSITE would actually put pressure on the player to step-up their game. Another example would happen for escape chapters. In harder difficulties you can either put a limit on the number of turns necessary to complete the level, or if one already exists you can reduce that number. The point here is that by throwing different creative map objectives and win-lose scenarios you can make games challenging without having to resort to inflating enemy stats.
While these points would help the difficulty of future Fire Emblem games there are other factors that would need to be taken into consideration. For starters, there will never be one magical difficulty setting that would cater perfectly to everyone. I think it would be in the best interest of the series to have multiple difficulty settings that could cater to a wider variety of people. I don’t plan on spending a lot of time on this point because current Fire Emblem games are already implementing this and most of them seem to be experiencing success with this approach. Recent Fire Emblem games (meaning from Shadow Dragon onward) are getting better at this becoming simultaneously more easy and more challenging at the same time. Sure Awakening sucked when it came to this but at least the game tried this approach and that has to count for something.
I would also add that a fair way to increase the game’s difficulty would be to make the game less RNG reliant. Both of the Archanea remakes attempted this approach and succeeded fairly well. Fire Emblem 12 took it a step further and made it so that in the higher difficulties the entire cast dies in 2 hits throughout the entire game. I personally don’t like that but there’s no denying that there are objective merits to this approach. Also, I would add that the increased relevancy of stat debuffs, status staves and accurate and powerful ballistae are all things that can severely increase the difficulty of a game too.
In short, if a Fire Emblem game is designed more like a puzzle it can be interesting without being rage-inducing.
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