Relationships in Fire Emblem and Why They Are Starting to Hurt the Franchise
I consider myself a pretty big fan of the Fire Emblem (FE) series. Well, I used to, anyways. Awakening and all flavours of Fates haven’t done it for me, and a big reason for that is the changes made to the support system and the subsequent fallout that affects the game’s characters. While I have some other problems with Awakening, and a host more misgivings about Fates, this is the facet of those games that bother me the most. Recently, in an interview with Eurogamer, various members of Intelligent Systems (IS) talk about the newest game, Shadows of Valencia, and mention some of the core mechanics of the series, namely the support conversations and, because of Awakening and Fates, marriage. Character romance wasn’t a pivotal part of the FE games before Awakening (with the exception of FE4, where there were mechanical elements related to marriage), but now it is considered a core feature, one that defines a FE game. Now, I am not saying that this shift cannot be a positive one, but its flawed implementation and high degree of importance is killing much of what makes FE such a great strategy franchise.
A Caveat Before I Continue
I have yet to play Shadows of Valencia, so it is possible that that game handles character relationships well, or even worse than what I outline here, but as the game strips out the marriage/child system, it isn’t critical to the main points that I discuss.
Support Conversations and Their Impact on the Game
When it comes to characters in the FE series, the main 5-8 characters in each game are generally well realized. However, many playable characters have very little characterization as a part of the main plot, a consequence of having a large number of playable characters as well as permadeath. Because of this, most characters have the bulk of their personalities and motivations hidden behind support conversations built up between other members of the army. These conversations are great for endearing the player to these characters beyond just their mechanical attributes, and it is a shame that many players won’t see many of them outside of looking them up online. Supports also boost unit’s stats, ranging from a nice boost to being completely broken (looking at you, FE9 and 10 earth pairs), so there is plenty of incentive to prioritize them. Before Awakening, I felt that support conversations were an awkward way of handling characterization, but overall an acceptable system. However, since then I think they have been mishandled.
The Problems That Have Arisen
The first issue comes up with how supports influence the flow of combat in FE. FE9 struck the perfect balance by having supports increase by just being deployed in the same mission together, which had the benefits of supports being easily attainable, as well as guaranteeing certain main plot points were reached to give extra context to the conversations. Older games had supports build up from having characters end their turns next to each other, which wasn’t great namely because of how slowly the supports built up. This causes supports to not happen naturally, and grinding them up involves just hitting end turn over and over again at the end of a mission, which was boring but ultimately didn’t hinder the games too much. The most recent games fix one problem by having the supports happen quicker, but they introduce a much larger problem: now characters have to commit a relevant action such as attacking, defending or healing next to each other. This makes grinding the supports more tedious, and enforces keeping units paired up for support purposes, rather than for tactical considerations. While this can be seen as another facet to one’s battle strategy, I find that it is constricting and doesn’t naturally flow with how most battles in the game play out. This is especially egregious because, as a player, I would want to recruit the children units, and having to grind for that is a chore. Grinding should not be required to experience a significant portion of a game’s content.
Beyond just combat mechanics, I believe that placing so much importance on marrying various characters is negatively impacting the kinds of stories that can be told between characters, and is forcing their personalities to be more exaggerated and quirky. Every male can have a romantic relationship with every female (with few exceptions), and the outcome is the same in all of these supports: marriage and a child. This reduces the variety of character stories that can be told, and the low number of non-romantic supports in the game doesn’t help. Another consequence of this is that the children’s support conversations with their variable parent are straight-up interchangeable. In older games, characters personalities were usually more grounded, which allowed nuance to come through to their characters, and many supports featured backstories, motivations and actual character development. In Awakening, and Fates especially, each character has one, maybe two, eccentric personality traits that are hammered home in every conversation. I feel that this makes the conversations themselves less interesting, as it just involves two characters trope-ing at each other and contains nothing of substance. Also, because characters can get up to an A support with as many characters as they want in the later games, the S rank marriage conversations are stilted and feel like they come out of nowhere, as no real, intense feelings are established in previous conversations. Finally, because of the mechanical significance of having children units join the army, and the fact that parent stats and skills carry forward, the player is more likely to pursue these relationships mechanically and not out of interest in story or character motivations.
Further Consequences
Not only is this shift of focus hurting Fire Emblem games, it is affecting another franchise that I love, Advance Wars (AW). This article from Eurogamer, referencing the same interview mentioned in the previous article, attempts to explain why there hasn’t been a new Advance Wars game in some time. The choice quotes from the article are these:
“The problem, though, is how it could assimilate one of Fire Emblem's most popular features - the relationship-building that takes place on the battlefield.” (Eurogamer)
“Personally, I'd love to do Advance Wars, but since it's harder to create relationships between its characters compared to Fire Emblem, I don't have a clear idea of what kind of setting it could have,“ (Hitoshi Yamagami)
This goes to show just how important character relationships are to the creative leads at IS: they feel that if they can’t bring a system over with the same level of importance, then it isn’t worth doing. However, Advance Wars is a wholly different game with very different focuses, despite being a turn-based strategy game from the same studio. The units on the field are generic, nameless and disposable, where the player-controlled units in FE are exactly the opposite. The characters in the game that matter are the commanding officers, who are exaggerated and cartoony (We are talking about someone who thinks they are a knight from the middle ages, a robot, and a military officer who doesn’t know what an airport is). It simply doesn’t make sense to place a huge importance on character romances, especially not player-influenced ones, when many of the characters aren’t portrayed very seriously. The last AW game, Days of Ruin, went with more serious characters and story. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was well told and worked for the game, and most importantly it was character-driven. There didn’t have to be an emphasis on character romance (especially with the post-apocalyptic, bleak setting) and instead the emphasis was rightly placed on character motivations and how they viewed their situation.
Taking either of the previous approaches to tone and characters can make for a compelling return to the series, but I fear that if character relationships are the reason that is holding them back, then any new AW will be a departure from what makes those games great and more of an assimilation of FE mechanics that I feel don’t work. This hesitation towards making another AW says to me that the people over at IS are not confident in making a game that would appeal to people based on sheer gameplay, a sentiment that makes sense given how FE was on its way out before Awakening, but I really think that they are missing the point. Advance Wars is not an RPG, and in many ways it is more akin to an RTS like Starcraft. Battles are highly self-contained, and the single and multiplayer content outside of the story is arguably worth more than the campaign. Diverting focus away from this gameplay would be a huge misstep.
What Would Be a Potential Solution?
I’m not sure that what I want is what’s best for the long-term health of the franchise. Personally, I would strip out the marriage/children system and return to how FE9 handled support conversations. However, given their insistence on how important character relationships are, IS must have some kind of market research that shows them that that is what people enjoy from the game. The most realistic solution is likely a compromise: keep the marriage/child system, but limit the number of potential mates for a character (perhaps even to only one possible pairing per character) to make each relationship feel more special and impactful, while also making support progression be based solely off of map deployment like FE9 to reduce grinding and allow character formations to be determined by tactics. Really though, the biggest issue I have with the character relations in the newer games is how shallow the characters are, and that is a problem that I don’t know if IS is even willing to fix.