The Mechanic I Want To See Return The Most

The Mechanic I Want To See Come Back The Most Is:

Fatigue (Thracia 776)

     It’s no big secret that I love the fatigue mechanic from Thracia 776. It’s one of the few mechanics I can think of that’s designed to counter low manning. One of the biggest problems with the Fire Emblem franchise as a whole is that you can beat it with a small team of super soldier juggernauts whose stats are way better than the enemy’s. Fatigue is the one of the two mechanics I’ve seen that try to counter juggernauting (the other one being debuffs from Fates). Granted, Thracia 776 can still be beaten with a tiny handful of units, but that’s not because of any shortcomings of the fatigue mechanic, but rather because of how ludicrously overpowered the infinite range warp staff is.

                       Fatigue adds an extra layer of strategic depth to the game by preventing the player from being able to use the same units over and over again. By doing so the player is encouraged to use different units so that if two units are fatigued out the player will have backup units ready to go. If the player knows that they’ll need a certain unit for future chapters they can decide to have a unit sit a chapter out so that they won’t fatigue in preparation for said future chapter. No other mechanic encourages widespread unit rotation like fatigue which is what makes it awesome.

   Unfortunately not everyone feels the same way about fatigue. In fact, there are a lot of outspoken critics of the fatigue mechanic. I’ve been coming across the same arguments over and over again to the point where I feel like I can respond to said arguments. So here we go:

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• Argument # 1: “Fatigue prevents me from using any unit that I want. Any mechanic that arbitrarily prevents me from using my favorite unit is automatically bad. Limiting player freedom is something no video game should ever do.”

                        If I had to pick the most common complaint it would easily be this one by a mile. Most people who don’t like Thracia’s fatigue mechanic usually play a certain way. They identify which units they like and they only use those units for the entire game. Then comes along fatigue which prevents them from doing that and forces them to use more units. They don’t like playing differently so we get this argument.

                     First of all, there’s nothing wrong with making the player use different units. In fact, I consider it to be an overwhelming positive that fatigue forces the player to adjust their normal style of play and adapt so that this never becomes a permanent obstacle. If anything, the series as a whole needs to do a better job of forcing people to play differently. The fact that this throws people off is a good thing.

                      Second, there is nothing arbitrary about the fatigue mechanic. I’ll admit that this is a quote of somebody who admitted that they never played the game, but I’ve seen other people express this kind of sentiment so it’s worth addressing. For those of you who don’t know how fatigue works in Thracia let me summarize this a bit for you. Whenever a unit fights, dances, or uses a staff, their fatigue meter grows by a certain amount. When that fatigue meter becomes greater than or equal to that unit’s max HP they are forced to sit out the next chapter. There is nothing arbitrary about fighting, dancing or using a staff. All of those things are deliberate choices on the part of the player.

       Last, but not least, is the sentiment about player freedom. Dondon151 once said something about the dismount mechanic along the lines of “the crucial question to ask when examining the FE 5 dismounting mechanic is, does it add something to the game by taking something away from it?”

                       While he was talking about the dismount mechanic I believe we can ask that same question about fatigue: Does fatigue add something to the game by taking something away from it? I would argue that it does. Preventing the player from being able to use the same units over and over again forces the player to use more units, figure out when the best time to use their favorite units, is and it forces the player to adjust their tactics and thinking. All of these things are good things. Also, Fire Emblem is a strategy game, not an open world sandbox. Player freedom is not the end all be all of a strategy game. Challenging the player’s mental capabilities and actually making them think tactically should be the end result of a game like this.

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Argument # 2:  Fatigue hurts healers way more than combat units. Therefore it’s bad.

If this were any other Fire Emblem game I’d probably agree that this undermines the fatigue mechanic. However this is Thracia 776, aka the game where staff users are great. Staves in this game are at their strongest and every staff bot in the game is at worst pretty good and at best one of the Top 5 Best Units in the Series, Safy (Both Mekkah and Ronaldo at one point have even put Safy in the Top 3 Best Units in the Series). If anyone in Thracia needed a nerf, it would be the staff users.

                                As for the argument that fatigue doesn’t hurt combat units all that much I have a couple of things to say. The first is: How is that worse than letting the player use them for the whole game? Being able to use a character for 5 - 10 levels before fatiguing is still a major improvement over letting the player spam them endlessly.

                         Another point is that if someone plays casually (in other words, they’re not trying to beat the game as fast as they can) they’re probably going to have said unit fatigue more often than an ltc veteran so they would switch out more frequently. Also, how frequent does a player need to switch out certain units before fatigue is considered either a good mechanic or a bad one? I still consider what we have now in Thracia to be a lot better than not having fatigue at all.

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• Argument # 3: Fatigue can make the game unwinnable under the wrong circumstances.

                  While it’s true that this can happen I think we need to ask ourselves one very important question: How did the player get to that point? Getting into this kind of unwinnable situation doesn’t happen with bad RNG rolls. It happens over time as the player makes one bad decision after another. The player has nobody to blame but themselves.

                          There are ways to avoid this outcome. For starters you could manage your money properly so that you can buy S drinks at the appropriate stores or you could simply use enough units so that the situation never becomes unwinnable. You could also reset when a unit dies instead of choosing to play without them. All of these things are in the player’s control.

                          If a future Fire Emblem game wants to change this by having a unit’s stats decrease then that’s cool too. However, the stat decrease must be significant. None of this “- 10 accuracy” or “prevents unit from gaining experience” bullcrap. I’m talking about cutting stats in half or dividing them by 4. Those would be real consequences.

                          Once again I consider this to be a positive for fatigue since this tells me that the mechanic has real consequences and punishes bad tactics. If someone were to ask me “Would you rather have a mechanic have a huge impact on a game or no impact at all?” I’d opt for the former instead of the latter. Having a huge impact is still having some kind of impact and has a reason to exist. A mechanic that makes no difference begs the question of why it exists, which is why I’m not a fan of the “fatigue” system in Shadows of Valentia. The “fatigue” system in Echoes has basically no impact whatsoever since the game is pretty generous with anti fatigue materials and it’s impact is limited only to the dungeons anyway.

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                Overall, I still love fatigue and the fact that the arguments against it are pretty bad tell me that this mechanic holds up under scrutiny. I’d love to see this in future titles and even with a few tweaks I believe this can have a very positive impact on the series as a whole.