God damn it.
It’s 2am. I’m tired. My back hurts. My eyes hurt. I can’t think clearly. I want to go to bed. I can’t stop playing Fire Emblem, because it’s so much god damn fun I want to stab myself with a pencil.
Playing Fire Emblem is like being in an abusive relationship. It’s a frightening, nerve-sharpening, anxiety-inducing experience. The game makes you hate it for its cruelty, and love it for its rare, begrudging approval, and hate yourself for not being good enough for it.
Wait, hold on. Do you even know what I’m talking about?
Fire Emblem is a turn-based tactical combat game with a fairly typical, straight-laced medieval fantasy setting. It’s a series of games, actually, across many platforms, but the core gameplay is consistent in all of them (the one that’s preventing me from sleeping at the moment is The Sacred Stones on the Game Boy Advance). At a glance, Fire Emblem appears to be a fairly conventional Japanese turn-based tactics game in the mould of Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force and Tactics Ogre, but as an experience it’s distinctly different from those. Despite the variation in narrative setting and tone, Fire Emblem has more in common with its Intelligent Systems stablemate Advance Wars, but in essence it’s something else entirely: an incredibly complex puzzle.
Not a puzzle game, in the mode of Bejeweled and Puzzle Quest, but an actual puzzle, like a sliding block puzzle. It’s a game that requires patience, forethought and deep contemplation. Masochism also helps.
Two elements set Fire Emblem apart from lesser turn-based tactical games: the weapon triangle and permadeath.
The weapon triangle is a basic rock-paper-scissors model: swords beat axes, axes beat lances and lances beat swords. It’s complicated by myriad exceptions, special cases and reversals, but as a basic design it’s hardly unique. What’s unusual is the extent to which Fire Emblem commits to the idea: even though the enemy outnumbers your soldiers a hundred times over, one enemy soldier holding the right weapon is often capable of taking out one of your main characters in a single round.
And when your characters die, they die permanently. Really permanently, forever, with no option to go back and start again. You can get around it by physically resetting your console, but the only way to take the move back is to restart the entire mission; the game overwrites your save file at the start of every single action, so once you move a unit, you’re committed. And with typical malice, the game designers put the most difficult fight of each level at the very end, so you frequently are forced to delete several hours of progress after a single unlucky dice roll.
Each fight in Fire Emblem must be approached with careful and precise planning. Send in an underpowered or poorly-matched unit and it will probably die; send in an overpowered unit and it may win easily, but will deny precious experience points to rookie characters, which can cripple you later in the game. Send in a well-matched unit of a lower experience level and you’ll reap the greatest rewards, although you’ll also run a greater risk of losing the character entirely.
Combat in Fire Emblem is something between alchemy and gambling. First you must methodically study the reaction each unit would have to each enemy unit – hit points, speed points, range, damage multipliers – and then, once your plan is set, you must engage the enemy and hope for good luck. A few fights are sure things; many are good bets, with a small chance of disaster; a few are nail-biting wild rolls of the dice. The latter often comes up when a plan falls apart: say a unit whose death you were relying on miraculously survives your attack and launches a counter-attack at one of your weakened, poorly-matched friendly soldiers, whom you thought was out of harm’s way…
But every enemy has a counter and every battle can be won if you’re really, really careful. The precise application of just the right units in just the right order and just the right combination will open the game up like a key in a lock. As an intellectual challenge, playing the campaign of Fire Emblem is like opening a hundred such locks in increasingly complex succession, with only a small handful of very specialised, very fragile, very brittle lockpicks.
Emotionally, it’s like being in an abusive relationship. You spend most of your time in a state of low-grade nervousness, overthinking everything you do, constantly tense, waiting to be struck down. More often than not, though, you do okay. Most of the time, the game gives you a pat on the back instead of a kick in the teeth. You feel relief as well as satisfaction, which amplifies every success in a golden haze of comforting neurochemicals, creating a sensation strong enough to trick you into thinking “I love this!”
Until you make a mistake. It could be anything. You move a step too far; you overlook some small detail; you accept a tiny bit of risk, because what’s the harm, right?
That’s when the game shows how little it thinks of you. Without warning or hesitation, it takes your past two hours of work and stomps it into dust. Oh, you didn’t check whether that soldier’s lance was one of the rare Reaver weapons that reverse the rock-paper-scissors? Now your main character is dead. You failed. The campaign is over.
The game – begrudgingly, spitefully – allows you to restart the mission after such a catastrophe. But with a final act of perversity, it forces you to delete your own saved progress first; loading the most recent save point simply replays the act of your hero being stabbed, chopped, blasted or gouged into oblivion, followed by the mocking GAME OVER screen. Like a sniggering bully, the game makes you confirm that, yes, you would like to erase the hours of progress you had made up until that point and start the level from scratch. You curse yourself for screwing up and promise yourself you’ll do better this time, you’ll live up to the game’s standards, you’ll earn its approval.
Fire Emblem is cruel and arbitrary. It doesn’t give you many breaks. You have to earn its respect, which makes you want it more, even though it sometimes seems to punish you at random. It’s not immediately engaging, but its harsh design makes it an emotional black hole: those who get caught up in its orbit are pulled ever deeper, gazing ever longer into the abyss.
I want to find out who was most responsible for the core design of Fire Emblem, take them out to dinner, ask them a dozen questions about game design and finally, after the dessert course, punch them in the face. Then I’ll put them in the boot of my car, drive them out to the middle of a desert and drop them off on a sand dune, with just enough water to make it back to civilisation. This should approximate the collective amount of suffering they’ve caused me over the years by making these games, and I hope it would give them the same feeling of tremendous satisfaction if they happen to survive.
Fire Emblem is one of my favourite games. You should definitely play it, provided that you hate yourself.
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Tags: difficulty, Fire Emblem, Game Design, tactics, turn-based
Nice. I wish I was retired, then I’d have time to get through rewarding but masochistic and time consuming games like this.