My Mechanics List Part 4

10 Mechanics I’d Like To See In Future Installments List

# 8 - Personal Skills

                         For all the crap that I’ve given Fates I will say that I like the personal skills system and would like to see it come back. What I like about personal skills is that it helps to give each character their unique “flavor” if you will. It can add to the type of contributions that a character can make which I consider to always be a good thing. There’s a lot of things that a personal skill can affect so it’s an idea that has a vast amount of possibilities. Here are the kind of things that personal skills are capable of in Fates:

• Stat modifiers: Most personal skills fall under this umbrella. Whether it’s increasing damage for allies, decreasing damage that enemies dish out or affecting accuracy, avoid or critical hit rates.

• Healing HP: (Azura’s personal skill. Setsuna’s personal skill lets her get healed more so it falls under this category)

• Prevent counter attacks under certain circumstances: (Shura’s personal skill)

• Let’s the enemy receive damage under certain circumstances: (Kagero and Hinata’s personal skills)

• “Capturing” characters: (Niles and Orochi’s personal skills)

• Getting Stuff: (Kaden and Keaton’s personal skills)

                         Alright you get the point. There were 6 different categories of things that could happen with personal skills. Even though the majority of them are stat modifiers in some way, there’s still a long list of ways in which they’re different from each other. Personal skills can help the player think and can act as an extra variable to take into consideration when planning strategies. For example if a unit has a personal skill that increases damage when the enemy is incapable of counterattacking that’s going to be something that the player will be thinking about when planning for their strategy. There are also personal skills that activate when a playable unit is adjacent to an ally. In that case you’re more likely to want to put that character next to an allied unit. That kind of personal skill puts an extra emphasis on unit positioning.

                            So in other words, personal skills as a whole tend to do a good job of adding strategy to the game. The only caveat I have is that if they do come back I’d like to see personal skills be a little less situational. Some of the personal skills in Fates only happen under very specific circumstances which means that you may not get to see their benefits as much. Even with that caveat I still think personal skills have a lot of potential to make future Fire Emblem installments more interesting and strategic.

10 Mechanics That Should Be Gone In Future Games

# 8 - World Map

                           I’ve never been a fan of the world map concept in any of the installments it’s been in. One problem is that it basically screams grindfest. Now I’m not saying that you have to grind in order to beat these games, I’m just saying that grinding is made extremely easy and in your face. World maps tend to make resources a bit too plentiful which undermines weapon durability and tosses out the concept of resource management. They’re over simplistic in terms of where it is you need to go, as opposed to providing multiple routes and ways to get to a certain destination. World maps break story immersion and tend to kill any sense of urgency a given part of the story might want you to have. One minute you have to escape an enemy that’s chasing you, the next you’re able to walk all over the map.  

                            I’m not a fan of My Castle either for similar reasons. Putting in an alternate dimension was a bad idea in the case of Fates story immersion. It also came across as exceptionally gimmicky too since most of the stuff in My Castle is not needed for beating the game.