Fire Emblem's Casual Difficulty Nearly Didn't Make The Cut

[The Wooster]

Fire Emblem's Casual Difficulty Nearly Didn't Make The Cut

Fire Emblem: Awakening director, Genki Yokota, talks difficulty, consequences and permadeath.

Some games are defined by their crushing difficulty. Dark Souls, for example, isn't a cult hit despite its blatant disregard for the player's emotional well-being, but because of it. Same goes for the recently released 3DS strategize-em-up, Fire Emblem: Awakening. As in previous Fire Emblem games, when characters die in Awakening, they die for good, taking their hard earned experience with them. Unlike the previous games, however, Awakening featured a casual difficulty level in which dead characters came back to life once battles are finished. This revolving door to the afterlife was met with scorn from some long-term fans of the series, but it did help draw in new players and make the game more bearable for the tactically challenged. A good decision in hindsight, but not everyone on the dev team was enthusiastic about the difficulty mode's inclusion.

"Me and Higuchi-san had been making a big stink about it, like, 'No, no -- don't do it!'" was director, Genki Yokota's response when his boss suggested the mode.

Yokota obviously eventually came around. In fact, he admits he now plays the game exclusively in casual mode, and he plans to include the lower difficulty in the next Fire Emblem game.

"But on the other hand -- and this is just a hypothetical example -- let's say we wanted to depict a really big and serious war scene," he continued. "In a situation like that, having permadeath would help lend weight to everything; it'd be much more tense and meaningful to players if their characters' lives were truly on the line, just like in a real war. So it really depends."

Source: Nintendo [http://fireemblem.nintendo.com/developer-interview/]

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[Mr. Omega]

This is the right way to do things. Having the OPTION for an easier difficulty as opposed to making the normal mode easier like AAA games have been doing.

As for FE:A itself, I still play it on regular mode, I just reset when a unit dies. Tedious? Yes. But I'm a perfectionist at these sort of things. Also, having certain levels be perma-death even in casual might be a good idea, as long as there's a warning for it.

 

[subtlefuge]

They traded a little bit of their extremely tight focus for a whole lot of customization. Ultimately, I choose to play it on classic, but I'm intrigued by the idea of playing on casual insane difficulty to try sacrificial strategies for individual battles.

I personally would be interested in a hardcore mode where every time you press 'end turn' it autosaves, thus preventing the player from resetting to save a life, but that's just me. I'm not sure if they could implement it with essential characters that aren't allowed to die.

Awakening is just such an amazing game that I can't be upset about little things that I don't like. Especially when the game gives me the option of completely avoiding them.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

As far as I've heard most people just reset when they lose someone anyway including the devs...so I don't see why this is a big deal.

 

[Something Amyss]

As far as I've heard most people just reset when they lose someone anyway including the devs...so I don't see why this is a big deal.

That's how everyone I know's always done it. It doesn't stop people from treating this like the end of the world, though.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Does casual mode actually make the game easier at all though? Or is it just the death reversal?


They could just add some new spellcaster class to revive people at a premium so you just lost lots of gold or something, they didn't need a whole mode for something like this. (unless casual mode changes things beyond the deaths being permanent)

 

[Kopikatsu]

If he really wants the game to be tense, then the game should auto-save after every move. Shitty? Most definitely. But as long as manual saves/quick saves/save states exist, then casual mode is basically how most people played the game to begin with.

 

[Johnson McGee]

In theory: permadeath adds weight to your decisions and makes you feel a penalty for bad moves.

In reality: save scumming.

 

[GAunderrated]

From a hardcore FE purist who played FE:A on the hardest difficulty in permadeath I must say I am glad they didn't chicken out on the casual difficulty.

It is hard convincing people to try out a good game that is so unforgiving. It is a great little club to be apart of but I would rather have people enjoy FE's fun gameplay and style.

I would also openly admit that when I want to replay the game for fun I will be doing it in casual mode. Sure I love the grueling punishment of permadeath...just not all the time. I'm glad it worked out for them.

 

[Yopaz]

Does casual mode actually make the game easier at all though? Or is it just the death reversal?

Uhm, I am not sure what you're saying here. Casual is a lot easier because of the death reversal. It removes the possibility of losing important units and lowers the risk of sending units to fight. Death reversal is the only thing that makes casual less difficult, but it makes it a lot less difficult.

As for the next part, people ***** about casual mode because it changes what was the point of Fire Emblem. Adding a unit that could revive units would displease both the people who want the classic experience and those who are currently enjoying the casual mode. The addition of the casual mode doesn't change the core gameplay and that is still the subject of a lot of hate. Adding a unit to change the gameplay would change the gameplay and would definitely get a lot of hate and honestly, that hate would be reasonable rather than the hate for some added option.

 

[Hades]

Personally i can't imagine playing fire emblem in a way where i can simply swarm the enemy with no further thought required and i'm not going to either, Classic all the way. I got no problem with the option though.

 

[verdant monkai]

The fans who were angry can go dick themselves it was OPTIONAL anyone complaining about something optional needs something worth complaining about. I dont think I would have bothered preordering it if it didn't have a casual mode, because I'm really bad at strategy games. Any feature which is optional and brings more people to the series is a good thing.

 

[AuronFtw]

Fire Emblem is a series that has typically toed the line between mediocre and good, and permadeath combined with various other stupid mechanics is one of the things always holding it in the firmly mediocre range.

The biggest detriment, particularly in the older games, was any map with Fog. In a normal map, you can see and plan logically around enemies already in place - when the combat is hard and the enemies are difficult, it takes skill and tactics to clear a map this way. Some maps threw in "surprise" encounters, like an army showing up unexpectedly halfway through the fight, and forcing the player to scramble by moving weaker units away (or just picking them up and carrying them for several turns). But those surprises were few and far between, and for the most part, could be dealt with by careful, methodical play.

Fog maps could not. You could play the most insanely boring, take-only-one-step-every-turn moves just to make sure your weak ass casters in the back aren't mobbed, and then 5 gargoyles will fly out of the mist and instakill him before you've had a chance to... well, do anything about it. And that's where the design falls apart *entirely.* It is no longer a well designed difficult encounter - it slipped into the realm of absurdity. And the combination of absurd, poorly designed artificial difficulty of fog maps with the additional artificial difficulty of permadeath mechanics simply meant that unless you had every spawn of every fog map 100% memorized, or walked around with 5 rogues to keep a 15-space area around your party lit up at all times to prevent blindside instakills, all that permadeath meant was a soft reset.

It had nothing to do with skill. It had nothing to do with tactics. You just got blindsided and characters killed, which meant you could re-do the mission from the beginning, with the knowledge that gargoyles will now come at you from the north on turn 8 (or whatever). With enough retries from the start, you can clear even the stupidest fog maps without death... but again, that is not skill. It's poorly designed artificial difficulty mixed with other artificial difficulty tactics culminating in a steaming pile of shit. I love difficult games - I love difficult games that force me to, within reason, shift and adapt to a changing fight (like an army appearing suddenly mid fight, for example). Scenarios like fog maps plus instakill, however, are precisely what kept Fire Emblem from ever really being a truly great strategy game. "Casual mode" should have just been called "play this mode to not have to deal with our shitty, outdated artificial difficulty system" and it would be more accurate.

 

[sethisjimmy]

Although I played on Classic mode, I think I may have enjoyed Casual.

To put it simply, in Classic, if a character dies, you reset. You can choose to continue on, but you'll be losing a ton of gameplay and story benefits. While this does make you play a lot more carefully, it doesn't really add any emotional weight that they want it to, mainly because losing a character can be so detrimental to the playthrough it's usually not worth continuing.

In Casual, the game becomes a little more free and strategic, where you can make sacrifice plays. The game becomes a lot more like a strategic game of chess.

So yeah, I'm glad they included it. I still don't understand this logic of "If it's easier, it will ruin it" as if the only reason anyone would want to play Fire Emblem is the difficulty.

 

[Sidmen]

To bad. The game would have been better without it.

Yeah, that pesky check mark/drop down clutters everything up!

Something like this has literally no affect on a game's quality.

 

[FredTheUndead]

To think, we were so close to an uncompromising, classic Fire Emblem.

Casuals win again

 

[TJC]

If he really wants the game to be tense, then the game should auto-save after every move. Shitty? Most definitely. But as long as manual saves/quick saves/save states exist, then casual mode is basically how most people played the game to begin with.

Wait... Fire Emblem stopped doing this? Damn, I'm behind (haven't played the console ones and Shadow Dragon looked like shit). I know that the GBA ones did save every single move. Hector hard mode was filled with my tears... :C