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Thracia 776 Map Design Review: Chapters 1 - 5

Chapter 1

       

     And here we have an example of a well designed first chapter. It avoids the pitfall that some first chapters run into: treating the player like an idiot. These types of first chapters usually have 3 enemies or less and are pretty small. Thracia’s Chapter 1 avoids all of these. Instead it has roughly eleven soldiers and a few archers. It also has houses that can give the player neat stuff (like the Pugi and Brave Axes), although the game doesn’t really tell the player who needs to visit said houses.

                       Having enemy mooks use lances is also an interesting departure given how most first chapters tend to give enemy mooks axes so that the lord can gain easy experience. You also get to start out with an actual army instead of starting with 1 or 2 characters. This leads to more interesting strategies and means that the chapter works better in multiple playthroughs. The boss in this chapter is harder than the bosses in most first chapters due to the really high defense bonuses given by thrones. He’s not too difficult though, but he’s nowhere near as easy as other first bosses either.

Overall Rating: Pretty Good

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Chapter 2

  Another quality map. Chapter 2 has a gaiden requirement: Beat the chapter with all the villages intact. This works as an anti-turtle measure because one house will for sure be threatened by the pirates while the house Ronan visits could be under threat if the player doesn’t play fast enough.  Enemy reinforcements come at the side of the map and they appear early enough to be threatening to the player. Since the player is going to be moving off to the right that means that there are two methods of approaching the boss at the end of the chapter which fulfills the “multiple routes” requirement for good map design.

    The boss has fairly high avoid, especially for a boss that only appears in Chapter 2. The only problems I have with the chapter is that there are no enemies on the left side of the map and that Ronan is not a worthwhile unit to recruit. The only reason you’re going to be visiting the house is for the gaiden chapter requirement, not for him.

Overall Rating: Pretty Good

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Chapter 2x

               Not a fan of this one. Chapter 2x is hurt by fog of war, which prevents the player from seeing enemies coming. This hurts the map because it does a good job at disincentivizing turtle disincentives with enemy reinforcements. Enemies appear in forts that are either behind the appear or below them which is a good thing as it helps to punish turtling. One problem with the map is that the bottom lefthand corner is pretty easy to ignore. You could say that the extra torches count as an incentive but the player has to go pretty far out of their way to get them. For all intents and purposes there’s only one method of approaching the chapter (via the bridges) which means that the map has to get docked points for that. It’s an interesting twist that you have to capture the boss though in order to recruit him. I like that.

Overall Rating: Meh

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    Chapter 3

                    This map is an indoor-outdoor hybrid chapter (although that only affects one of your units, but hey credit should be given where credit is due). The map has 3 doors that you can open to approach although realistically you’re probably only going to open the middle one due to how convenient it is. However, there are still two methods of approaching the final boss.

                                 You’re also given an interesting side objective where you have to bring the children NPCs to the houses at the bottom right hand corner of the map. Half of the houses will immediately reward you for bringing their kids back. The rewards in this case are a shield ring and a Baldo scroll, both of which are excellent rewards which makes rescuing the children worth it. The other half don’t immediately reward you though. The reward for bringing back Corpul doesn’t come until Chapter 7, but you get a freaking Warp staff so it’s worth it. The other reward comes in the form of a recruitable Armor Knight which is...debatably worth it. Once again the game doesn’t tell you which NPC to bring to which house which can be a little annoying.

If you spend too much time recruiting the children enemies will spawn at the aforementioned red tiles. If you take really long then enemies will spawn near the boss. I think the map would have benefitted from enemy reinforcements spawning earlier as that would have put more pressure on the player. I do think it’s cool though that the enemy bishop will unlock the door and unlock the treasures. This ultimately results in him getting the Meteor tome, which will make the player’s life miserable. Although, you could argue that ballistic tomes force the player to play faster since nobody wants to deal with that crap.

                                       Overall Rating: Pretty Good

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            Chapter 4

                          Ah the infamous Chapter 4. This map begins with Leif, Karin, Rifis and Fergus in prison without weapons or stuff. Brighton, Lara and Makua (what is a Makua?) appear on the right and they’re the ones who have to bust the player out. Enemy density starts out incredibly small, but the chapter’s ingenious use of reinforcements quickly changes that. The near endless supply of enemy reinforcements puts an immense amount of pressure on the player. If the player plays too slow they will get overwhelmed.

                      The map has two really interesting side objectives that spice the chapter up. The first are the NPCs. In order to get the gaiden chapter they all have to escape. Keep in mind that enemies will try to capture them, and can block off certain passages which makes accomplishing this objective difficult. The second objective comes from Leif and Rifis’s stuff being put into treasure chests. Obviously these treasures are important, but at the same time if you have too many treasures you’ll end up spending way more time getting them which means that enemies will have more time to gain reinforcements and put pressure on the player. This also affects how the player will play Chapter 3 and who they give stuff to because if you need something to stay with you during the Manster Escape chapters then you’ll need to give it to Leif and Rifis.

  Then there’s the top portion of the map. It’s a tight squeeze full of enemies. It also has a recruitable character (Dalshien) that makes things tricky. If you want to recruit said character you’ll have to avoid killing him while dealing with the other armor knights that will slow you down. Meanwhile enemies will continue to pour in. If the player doesn’t play smart they will get boxed in from 2 different directions. There’s also an escape tile. If the player doesn’t want any character to get left behind then they have to have that character escape which has some tricky implications as to when you want your character to leave while still leaving other characters behind to fend off enemies.

          P.S. This map gave us The Green Brigand. That should make it awesome by default. Also, let us all take a moment of silence for the Green Brigand.

  Overall Rating: Excellent

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          Chapter 4x

                       Chapter 4x begins with the enemies being next to the player’s units, which forces combat to occur. The enemy formation at the start is interesting since you have a combination of Armor Knights and mages, both of whom can deal extensive damage to individual units if the player is not careful. Once again this map has NPCs that need to escape. Except the difference here is that the player’s reward does not come in until later in Chapter 6. However, I am docking the map points for not telling the player since it’s not obvious what the benefit here is.

                               Once the player has beaten this part of the map they are treated to recruiting Asvel, who is a fantastic unit. There is a room off to the left filled with neat treasure like the Brave Sword and the Life Ring. This also provides an extra way to approach the room that comes between the player and the escape tile. Last, but not least, there are enemy units that approach the player from behind in case the player plays too slowly. Once again I wish that they showed up a little bit sooner since the player will most likely be far away from them, but at least they’re there. One last note is that this is another fog of war chapter. It doesn’t hurt the map too much here though since the map is simply designed.

                                          Overall Rating: Decent

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         Chapter 5

                               This map has an interesting turtle disincentive: Nanna and Eyvel. Both of these characters are in danger since the game will throw difficult enemies at them. You’ll be forced to head to the corridor on the right just to avoid having Nanna get wrecked. Bytheway, Nanna gets reduced movement since she’s a dismounted troubadour in an indoor map. While Eyvel will eventually be able to beat whatever is thrown at her she’ll eventually have to face off against Mareeta who she will not fight back against. That will cause problems because Mareeta is a recruitable character so if the player chooses to kill her off they deprive themselves of a swordmaster with overkill offense. On the other hand, if the player doesn’t do anything, and just lets Eyvel sit there, the end result will be death for Eyvel. Plus you have to open the door to Eyvel and Mareeta in order to escape the chapter since there’s no escape tile before then. However, this only applies to the beginning portion of the map and no longer becomes an issue once Nanna is recruited over to the player’s side.

    Fortunately there’s a bishop with the Meteor tome that the player wouldn’t want to deal with so you could argue that that disincentivizes turtling. That and since you can capture him and claim that Meteor tome for yourself so that’s a thing. Enemy units are set up in groups that can threaten the player. For example, there’s the boss and his archers that can kill a unit that’s in the wrong position. There’s also a bishop with Meteor set up behind an Armor Knight and Soldiers. Last but not least there’s a whole group of mages down at the bottom as well. I am going to dock the map points though for having a random treasure that’s super out of the way. The map also fails to meet the “Multiple Approaches” requirement too.

Overall Rating: Decent

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Thoughts So Far: Thracia 776 starts with a bang. The maps pull no punches and do a pretty good job at requiring strategy out of the player. Turtling gets punished and the player is incentivized for going in different directions. The use of side objectives are also clever in these maps and require a great deal of thinking. This might possibly be the best collection of earlygame maps in the Fire Emblem franchise.  

Map Rating Criteria

1. Multiple Approaches: Are there 2 or more routes the player can take toward reaching a boss? Are they meaningful? Is one route significantly better than the other ones presented?

2. Turtle Disincentives: How does the map punish turtling? If you don’t know what the definition of turtling is here’s the Wikipedia article. Some maps will instead hand the player a reward for going faster instead, like giving them more money or a gaiden chapter. This counts for fulfilling this requirement.

3. Side Objectives: NPCs, villages to rescue, etc. This isn’t something that a chapter has to have but it does count as brownie points when certain maps do this well.

                         Another thing I’ll be looking for will be things like super easy ways to trivialize a map. Examples of this will be like having a paired up wyvern fly in a straight line and thus beat a map in a few turns. Warp skipping doesn’t count because warp can trivialize almost any map. Being trivialized by an infinite range warp staff says less about the map and more about the warp.

I should also point out that some maps don’t necessarily have to have all these things. Exceptions to these rules exist, but I’ll make sure to explain why whenever that map comes around. The first maps of the game will generally be rated more leniently because none of them fulfill important requirements. Instead, they have a different criteria that I’m looking for.

                           Here is the rating system I’ve come up with:

• Excellent: The highest map rating. Goes toward maps that do the positive things well.

• Pretty Good: A great map that has a couple of things that prevent it from getting a pass.

• Decent: This rating is for maps that have more positives than negatives, but have more noticeable negatives.

• Meh: A mediocre map. Not terrible per se, but also not great either.

• Below Average: A bad map with a couple of redeeming qualities that prevent from being utter crap.

• Fail: The lowest map rating. This is reserved for maps that either don’t do anything well or are really easy to undermine.

                         At the end of a game’s map rating I count up every single map that gets a “Decent” rating or higher (Pretty Good and Pass) and then divide that by the number of total maps in the game. That becomes the game’s rating on how good their maps are. I should also point out that if a game has multiple routes (like Thracia 776 or Binding Blade for example) then all maps from all route will be taken into account. I hope you enjoy the map ratings.

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.

The Two Mechanics That Need To Die

The Two Mechanics I Never Want To See Ever Again in Fire Emblem:

My Unit

                  Back when my blog was first starting out I made a post specifically about why I do not like My Unit as a mechanic. You can read it here: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/03/my-unit.html

                    While I still hold those sentiments for the most part there is something else I would like to add to that. My Units are also bad for the gameplay of the games they’re in. They’re always dominant on the battlefield, so much so that everyone else more often than not look pretty scrubby by comparison. Robin is usually put in the same tier as Sigurd in terms of being disgustingly overpowered. Kris (the My Unit of FE 12) is usually pretty close to Robin in terms of sheer dominance and Corrin is also ridiculously good. So basically, My Unit is a travesty to the storytelling, characterization and gameplay of whatever game they happen to be in.

S rank supports and the Second Generation Mechanic

                 The other mechanic that needs to die a thousand deaths are the S rank supports and the Second Generation Mechanic. S rank supports are usually poorly written to the point of being comical or jarring and can have the effect of reducing the cast to fetish fuel. One moment two characters will talk about pies, the next moment they’re getting married. Supports were better when they were limited. That way the writers didn’t have the burden of having to write anywhere near as many lines of dialogue so they could focus more on character building. Then you add the fact that My Unit, the character who is supposed to be the player, can bang virtually any member of the cast and it turns into something that resembles the remains of Edward and Alphonse’s mother after their failed transmutation of her.

                             As far as children go, Holy War is the only game that did it right. In Holy War the children have a valid, justifiable reason to exist in the narrative of the game and the mechanics are even better too since your choices matter a great deal more than in Awakening or Fates. In Awakening you could argue that there’s at least some justification for having children since time travel is a thing. Unfortunately this causes problems but that at least makes A LOT more sense than the stupid hyperbolic time chamber that Fates brought up. It seems like the only reason why Fates implemented the children mechanic is because Awakening had it and people liked that about Awakening.

                              At this point I’m not sure how else you could implement the children mechanic without copying a different game. The only thing I could think of is to have a timeskip similar to how Holy War did it where both generations coexist. This would cause a lot of balancing issues though and even then it still would be really similar to how Awakening did it. While it’s fun to come up with optimal child builds it can get old after you do it enough and generally speaking I think there are more interesting mechanics to explore.