A Few Comments on Burnout Revenge
February 9th, 2013
Back in 2007, I sunk 42 hours into Burnout Revenge. I’ve always had a fondness for arcade-style racing games like Daytona USA and Crazy Taxi, and Burnout Revenge was the first arcade racer I’d played with a meaty campaign that I could really sink my teeth into. When I returned home for Christmas in 2011, I took Burnout Revenge for a spin. Here are a few of the things I noticed:
- The core engagement of Burnout Revenge comes from driving at fast speeds (reflex skills) while simultaneously managing various side tasks to build your boost meter (knowledge skills).
- There’s a lot of variety in the things you can do to earn boost: drifts, jumps, takedowns, near-misses, taking shortcuts, and comboing up loose vehicles are some examples.
- These sub-goals scale up too. Chain together multiple takedowns, for example, and your boost meter will max out.
- The track designs and distance between most racers ensure that the player can’t exploit the same boost-gaining techniques: they must vary up their skill set.
- There are loads of ways to organically scale the difficulty, including speed, alternate routes, moving with or against traffic, as well as the previously-mentioned sub-goals.
- In order to maintain the game’s speed and offer enough breathing room for the player to multi-task, the designers took a few liberties with the game’s realism:
- The player isn’t heavily penalised for hitting walls. They can actually skirt barriers to minimise the loss of speed.
- The player’s car can hit small vehicles from behind to send them flying (which earns them boost). Big vehicles, though, lead to rear-end collisions, while the player can only knock other racers.
- It’s difficulty to crash a landing.
- The wind marks as the player’s driving create the sensation of speed without speeding up the gameplay.
- When the player does a takedown, the camera spins around to show the full extent of the collision. Although the stylish shot interrupts gameplay, the screen turns yellow and the player’s car switches to autopilot so that the transition isn’t jarring at all. The auto-pilot itself doubles as a reward.
- Blowing up your car after you crash feeds back into the strategy and extends the interplay between competitors
Feels good to be back in the writing loop. Anyone have any experience with this game or the series as a whole?
E3 2012 Game Design Insights and Commentary
June 13th, 2012
Walking down a hallway, solving an obvious puzzle and mashing a button for a quick time event: sounds like one of the most anticipated games of 2012 to me! Or at least, this was the response by many “critics” in print, the enthusiast press and on blogs to the Tomb Raider reboot showed off at last year’s Microsoft E3 event. The game’s second live demo at this year’s show, a bunch of disconnected; barely-interactive gameplay sequences, only provided further proof of the lack of concrete game design. Yet while the game’s gratuitous brutality has been rightfully questioned, the equally dubious gameplay has avoided heavy scrutiny. The uncritical eye of the majority of game “critics” continues to be distracted by flashy graphics and throat stabbing. (For many of the reasons why, read here. I’ll be exploring some more reasons later). This year’s E3 brought its fair share of Tomb Raiders including Resident Evil 6, Last of Us, boating in Assassins Creed, Star Wars 1313 and Sleeping Dogs—most of which will be hyped beyond reasonable doubt; some of which will probably win something at the game critics awards. Update: Turns out I was right on the money.
While there is growing disapproval around Tomb Raider and other games of its ilk, such voices haven’t reached a critical mass to drown out the marketing buzz. This E3, I compiled notes on the conferences and key games of the show, with a focus on insightful commentary and game design. Although my ideas are limited to trailers and game demos put online, I hope it gives you an idea of the type of commentary we’d be getting if critics valued gameplay as much as they say they do.
Please let me know what you think and what you made of the show in general with the new Disqus comment system. You can sign in with your social media handlers too.
Microsoft’s Conference
- They mush have said “the power of Kinect” at least 10 times.
- Speaking of which, it seems that Microsoft have finally realised how difficult it is to design games for Kinect as most games/services they showed focused on voice commands. In which case, why not just use a headset? It’s great that Microsoft are exploring voice control game design, but it’s such a minor area to throwing so much money behind.
Smartglass
- An ill-considered idea which seems like more of a means to promote Microsoft’s new tablet and OS.
- Without standardised controls, no one will develop games for it and there’s little benefit in spreading information over several devices when they don’t seem to interact much with one another.
- Why not just use a PC to find extra information on music and movies? It’s faster, easier and you can find more specific information.
- The tech, however, is undeniably cool and I love the idea of unifying devices around the TV. There’s certainly a lot of potential here. I hope Microsoft can realise it.
Halo 4
- Considering the gung-ho nature of Microsoft’s press conference, the demo was a bit tepid and lacking cliffhanger.
- Some people noted that Halo 4 seems similar Metroid Prime. This is because some of the new enemies look like space pirates, while the others appear to be natural fauna. There was some visor switching going on too.
Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6
- Both of these games look ridiculously bad. I think that game designer Matt Glanville put it best on Twitter:
“I’d get excited more if all the effort/money that went into spectacular-but-shallow set pieces was diverted to deepen the core mechanics. Look how much Mario does with a simple JUMP mechanic. That’s what I want to see from shooters: versatile core mechanics. Instead you get sequences that don’t gel with the core mechanics, so they get simplified into something that is incoherent with the game. We all know why they exist though: eye candy for trailers, to shift units.”
Dead Space 3
- Was partly leaked to death several months prior. I think it got lost in the shuffle, especially considering how similar it looks like Gears of War/Lost Planet.
- I guess Visceral didn’t have much choice, but to make the series more action-orientated. You can’t iterate much on well orchestrated jack-in-a-box scares.
- The large worm-like creature looks like the final boss from DS1…great.
Farcry 3
- What a wicked trailer, but let’s be honest, it doesn’t look like sanity is incorporated into gameplay aside from tripping out the visuals.
- The 4 player co-op at the Sony presser looked pretty last gen.
Metal Gear Rising
- The story looks like Platinum added a layer of Vanquish-esque McCheesemo to Kojima’s already bad writing. MAKE IT RIGHT.
- The sword slicing segments are slowed down; allowing the player to cut cleanly, have transparent blue honeycomb highlights; for visual reinforcement, appear isolated or to run on a cool down timer; preventing the player from abusing the mechanic, and the blade leaves a shadow on the target; making it easier to judge depth. Clean game design. By comparison, in the pre-Platinum Games version it looked like Raiden could cut whenever the player wanted, following the original “cut at will” slogan. Putting the dexterity-heavy slicing with the analogue stick front and centre probably created a lot of design issues which saw the original version eventually get scrapped.
- I do hope that the other slogan, “cut anything”, still applies and, based on the trailer, it appears to be the case. How much so, I guess we’ll find out later.
Sony Conference
- Sony started off talking about mortality and ended with a man begging for his life before getting shotgunned in the face.
Last of Us
- Hand-to-hand combat looks contextual and heavily automated. Lots of long animations taking the player out of gameplay.
- The enemy AI looks heavily scripted too.
- The menu reveals light inventory elements.
- Few survival mechanics were shown off, which makes me think that, despite its flaws, I am Alive, may be a more progressive post-apocalyptic survival game.
- The developers were supposedly inspired by The Walking Dead, which I’m currently reading, yet Walking Dead is hardly this senseless.
Beyond
- What a statement by Sony to put this as their first act.
- I was really excited for this game and then they just showed a cutscene, WTF?
Call of Duty Vita
- “For the first time ever you’ll have a AAA first person shooter in the palm of your hands with a beautiful 5 inch screen, dual analogue sticks and seamless online connectivity” Resistance: Burning Skies only came out last week guys…
God of War: Ascension
- The Wikipedia page describes several of the changes made to the combat system, all of which sound great, albeit, hardly the overhaul the series sorely needs.
- I’m curious how they player will know that they’re still in control and what inputs they can make when the visual prompts are taken out of the QTEs.
- I don’t like that for the existing QTEs the face button icons are all orange. Colour makes it easier for the player to read the prompts. This is why QTEs on the Wii are so horrible. Putting the prompts to the side of the screen, corresponding to their placement on the pad, makes them even harder to identify.
- I like how the grapple pull mechanic has been remapped to the triggers, which is more intuitive. The animation doesn’t look as slick as in God of War III though.
- Sub-weapons that Kratos can take from enemies: Sensible idea as the combat system needs constant variety to keep it interesting. Mapping it with the other face buttons, to circle, gives it precedence in the player’s consideration set.
- It would be cool if Kratos could disarm enemies. For example, when not holding a sub-weapon, Kratos could stun an enemy with a hard attack and then press circle to disarm them.
- It would also be good if the sub-weapon degraded over time, this way, the player would be forced to use a variety of weapons.
- Kratos didn’t have the block-and-re-fire-energy mechanic in the demo. I hope they keep it in as Kratos has few defensive moves, let alone moves that require the player pay attention to the enemies’ attack patterns.
- Looks like spells and/or the rage moves return.
Nintendo Conference
- Most of the WiiU games they showed were already mentioned, prototyped, featured in montages or name dropped by developers last year. The lack of surprises is baffling.
- After wheeling John Richettello out last year to spout praises for the system, EA only showed Mass Effect 3 this year.
- Pikmin 3 appears to benefit as much from the Wiimote as it does the gamepad. Similarly, New Super Mario Bros. U seems to innovate as much with new game ideas (coloured Yoshis, squirrel suit) than gamepad and online functionality. Nintendo Land looks just magic and makes the most use of the new console and its controller. Unfortunately, fair or not, “hardcore” gamers don’t find a selection of smaller games as convincing as a “full” game. A fully-featured single player game by Nintendo’s first party studios which uses both the social and gamepad innovations of the WiiU would have gone a long way to appease these people and make a stronger case for the system.
- The criticisms made against the WiiU’s 3rd party support are all about parity with the other consoles, which will naturally take some time to happen. Still, it’s disappointing that more 3rd party “ports” aren’t making their way to the console at launch. Why isn’t Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 going to be on the new console at launch? If Activision can downgrade the Xbox 360 version to the Wii, then they can surely port it to the WiiU. With this said, Nintendo had the most 3rd party exclusives at the show and almost all of them look new and innovative. Further, the extra features and gamepad elements of the ports are in many ways equivalent to exclusive DLC. By virtue of developing for the gamepad, developers offer extra exclusive content to the platform. In terms of fresh ideas, I think that the 3rd party titles haven’t been so comparable to Nintendo since the DS.
- The small talk with the Ubisoft and Warner Bros. CEOs was just…awkward. At least they were warmly greeted onto the stage though and with titles too, unlike the Capcom guys at the Microsoft press conference.
- If Miiverse’s note system is closed or can’t connect to existing social networks, it will fail.
- Why did Nintendo need to bring in the 3DS guy just to show off 3 games that we already saw last year? They could have shown Project P-100 in that time.
- Nintendo Land should have swapped places with Pikmin 3. Nintendo should have focused less on the amusement park aspect of the game which just looks abhorrent. A fire work display? I wanted to vomit.
- Why not show Game and Wario at the conference?
- I hated the campy pre-show video with Non-specific Action Figure, but absolutely loved it on second viewing. E3 needs more camp.
- They need to put a Non-specific Action Figure trophy in the next Smash Bros.
- Demos at the 3DS Software Showcase were perhaps better suited to their E3 hub as they went on a bit long, but it was nice to have the games discussed in detail. Why not announce Fire Emblem as well? It freaking stormed the Japanese monthly charts on release, outselling the other 19 titles after only a week on the shelves.
ZombiU
- Dark Souls-esque passive online, where if one of your friends dies in their game, their zombie appears in yours (with their name overhead).
- Unlike Resident Evil 6 and Last of Us, ZombiU actually seems to be designed around survival and horror. Here’s 3 examples:
- You play a variety of characters who inevitably die throughout the game. After one character dies, the player embodies a new character and must relocate their previous self to recover their lost goods. That is, the player takes on a unique role as an overseer and uses the information gained from this outsider perspective to help the different characters progress through the story. I love the idea of this daisy-chained narrative.
- Because the player’s looted inventory is their “power”, so to speak, the player, the collective unit of the individual characters, starts off weak and slowly becomes more powerful.
- At various points the player will need to ransack lockers and lock-pick doors among other things, which are done on the WiiU gamepad. While the player is looking down at the controller, the TV screen frames the character in a 3rd person perspective which allows the player to see if any zombies are approaching from behind. Simulating real life, looking up from the gamepad allows the player to “peak over their shoulder”. This set up facilitates tension and all manner of scares without the need to handicap the player’s movement and attack mechanics.
- No idea why they showed an ugly CG trailer in the press conference.
- When zombie Reggie moved his face in the press conference, you could see the edges of the texture map.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
- The way stickers are used as battle commands, items for side-missions and ways to interact with the environment looks magic. Not only does it unify these disparate parts of the game, but it removes the text commands from battle.
New Super Mario Bros 2
- I’m concerned that the 1 million coins conceit will ultimately devalue the coin as a game element.
- Grouping coins together creates a stronger pull for the player to scale the difficulty.
- With 2 players, the camera only tracks the player in front, pushing the other player off-screen. This forces the 2 players to stay together and communicate. What was likely a consequence of the 3DS’s low resolution screen has been turned into an advantage. This is like what Miyamoto said: one solution can often solve many problems.
New Super Mario Bros U
- Coloured Yoshi’s return. From the trailer one can see that: the yellow Yoshis are light sources, blue Yoshis spit out bubbles which act as platforms and trap enemies; turning them into coins, and the pink Yoshis act as inflatable balloons.
- In the Iwata Asks videos, the terrain has red outlines around it. So it seems that the player with the gamepad will be able to manipulate the terrain. This is far more interesting than the spawning platforms they showed off.
Game and Wario
- I wish they had videos on Nintendo’s E3 portal explaining each of the games.
Rayman Legends
- The player using the gamepad takes the role of a green fly character. Touching anywhere on the screen moves the fly to that position. Because the player on the game pad has a variety of things to interact with at the one time, the fly is constantly twitching around the screen. This would normally make the avatar’s animation appear jerky and distracting, however, it perfectly fits the way flies often buzz in and out of our vision, and works with the animation and voice overs to further exaggerate the zany character.
Nintendo Land
- When Nintendo first unveiled the name, the amusement park hub and Katsuya Eguchi started talking about his love for theme parks, I hated it. It just seemed too sickly sweet.
- The amusement park is cluttered, ugly (Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts anyone?) and doesn’t even look like an amusement park. It’s a giant floating disc with icons. If they never said it was an amusement park, I probably would’ve never realised.
- After watching some videos though, I must say that the individual games are impressive; lots of thoughtful nuggets of good game design.
- I’m most excited about the Donkey Kong game, although, it might be tiresome holding the controller up at the TV all the time.
- For the Animal Crossing game, I love the idea of handicapping the player with the gamepad by designating the control of the 2 guards to the 2 analogue sticks. This way, they need dexterity and knowledge to win.
Batman: Arkham Asylum Armoured Edition
- On the surface, the gamepad implementation is varied and well suited to the existing mechanics, and it seems that they’ve made smart decisions in reworking the game for the WiiU. However, it all hinges on the small details, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
- Graphics don’t look so crash hot. Seems like they farmed it out to the B team.
Misc
- Wii Fit U – The tobogganing game requires that you lie on the balance board. Controlling a game with your ass, that’s innovation.
- Castlevania 3DS – Slick visuals. Made by Mercury Steam, the developers of the console reboot.
- Watchdog – Refreshing because it is relevant, something which can only be said for..well, maybe just this game at E3. It’s pretty amazing how few mainstream games are about contemporary issues. The gameplay demo looked far less impressive than the initial trailer suggested.
- General – Why don’t Sony and Microsoft have isolated game demonstrations with explanations on their portal sites? It would have helped me write more about their games.
Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones – Layers of Scalability and Advanced Play
July 16th, 2011
Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones is the second GameBoy Advance title in the long-running strategy RPG series as well as, incidentally enough, only the second game to be released to the Western market. Fire Emblem is in essence the Advance Wars template with assembly line tanks, artillery and foot soldiers replaced with fully featured characters with their own stats, class, inventory and role in the grand narrative. The hybridisation results in deep tactical play with a lean towards party management and class-based tactics.
For an interactive video overview of basic Fire Emblem gameplay, try here. This site is for the latest DS game, Shadow Dragon, but the basic rules are identical to Sacred Stones.
There are two core components to the Fire Emblem games which you could call the strategy and the RPG aspects. The strategy portion of the game is the movement of units along the battle field, which parts of the terrain to take advantage of, how to coordinate your squad, how to deal with the problem at hand, combat, the weapons triangle and the class system. The RPG portion of the game is the character/party management, forming a well-rounded party, choosing when to upgrade to the next class, what weapons and inventory to give each character.
This all sounds pretty complicated and while the series has been criticised for just appealing to its small niche, Sacred Stones does a great job at layering advanced play so that both new and veteran players can be engaged on different levels. The following are a series of examples that demonstrate how the game supports new players while at the same time appealing offering hidden challenge to veteran players.
Selectable Difficulty
When starting a new save file the player can choose one of three difficulty modes: easy mode; offers hints and tutorial as you play, normal mode; no game hints or tutorial and hand mode; a harder difficulty. On top of doing what most games already do in regards to difficulty settings, that is, modifying a few variables like enemy strength, Fire Emblem scales the amount of tutorial as well.
Raising from the Lowest Class
In the Fire Emblem games each character has a class that determines their movement, abilities and statistical profile such as knight, mage and archer. Each class has a (lower) base class and an (upper) promoted class. For example, a knight is a base rank, while a general is a promoted class. The layout of the class evolution tree here may be helpful.
While new players may rely on the handful of promoted class characters present to guide them through the game early on, expert players know that these units will eventually hit a brick wall. Every unit in the game is capped at level 20. Once a unit reaches this level they can no longer level up and increase their stats. The only way to break out of this is to advance from a base class to a promoted class by using a special evolution item which, in turn, ranks up the unit, increases their stats a bit and puts them back at level one. Players can use the class-specific evolution item only once when they’re level 10 or above.
Units that enter the game already ranked up to the promoted class generally have middling stats which suggest that they weren’t maxed out at level 20 in their prior class before they changed rank. Therefore a unit which begins at a low rank, levels up to level 20, ranks up to the next class and levels up 20 levels again ends up a far stronger unit than the higher class unit with average stats which levels up only 20 levels.
Expert players are quite aware of this situation and therefore only use base class characters at the start of the game and only then rank up their units once they hit level 20 in order to end up with the strongest characters come the end of the game. New players on the other hand can rely on the promoted class characters like Seth (Paladin). The end result is that new players have an easier start to the experience, but the further they progress the less of a competitive edge their characters will have. For veteran players its quite the opposite. Using lower ranked classes early on makes missions more difficult, but the result is a stronger party in the long run. This system presents a trade off between short term pain for long term gain.
Furthermore, Sacred Stones introduces new trainee ranks: journeyman, recruit and pupil. These ranks are even lower than base classes and are about as uncommon as fully ranked character units. Unlike the other classes, a journeyman, recruit or pupil will automatically evolve to their respective base class on reaching level 10. Trainee ranks thereby allow players to squeeze another 10 levels out of their unit.
So, a unit that begins at a promoted rank can only level up 20 times, while a unit that begins at a trainee class can level up a total of 50 times. Trainee class characters obviously aren’t as strong as promoted class characters initially and its not as though trainee class characters are neatly handed to the player from the onset either, on the contrary they enter the game at various different chapters. These conditions ensure that players looking to max out a character potentially up to 50 levels need to endure 1) the slow build up of these units in their weaker stages 2) the duration of time it takes for these characters to become available. On the latter point, players that want to wait it out for trainee rank characters need to rework their entire party composition around the eventual arrival of a trainee character, filling that hole in the meantime. For these players it’d be pretty useful to know exactly what trainee class characters are available and when, so either playing the game through first or referring to a FAQ would be needed. As we can see, the effort required to form a highly effective team is a significant burden, but also an optional one. New players can choose to overlook these details completely and just rely on the stronger promoted class characters that can get them through battles.
Maintaining Level Balance/Squeezing for Experience
When managing your party you really want all characters to be pretty well balanced since it’s not all that helpful to have an inconsistent mix of strong and weak characters. There are however aspects of the game that upset this balance. For example, the changing state of the battle field (new units moving in, fog of war, terrain, class attributes) and the class system which gives different units different strengths and weaknesses.
On that latter point, for example, calivers, myrmidon and fighters are all easy to level up because they have a long movement range and strong attack/defence. This means that it’s easier for them to get into the thick of combat and survive. A priest, on the other hand, can only heal. They have weak defence, can’t attack and limited mobility. Healing only grants them a small burst of experience and the limited mobility means that even when they could go to heal another unit, they may not be able to reach their desired target. Similarly, archers can also be difficult to level up as they always need to hang back and avoid direct confrontation.
In order to ensure that all party members get a fair distribution of experience and no one gets left behind, the player needs to design their strategy around the dynamics of the class system and the arrangement of terrain.
For example, when I play Fire Emblem Sacred Stones I place strong units at the front of the pack and put them in range of enemy units, while just behind them are mages, archers and healers with pegasus knights hanging in on the side. When the enemy front attacks, the strong units automatically counterattack the enemy, taking a big chunk out of their health. After the enemy’s turn, I then get one of my mages or archers to finish off one of the enemies, breaking their line of defence. After this I push the healers up to heal the strong units and then send the strong units to hold the next front. Lastly, I let the mages, archers etc. to come in and clear off the weakened front and rack up most of the experience. This strategy works particularly well in confined linear map layouts to strengthen up weaker units.
These types of tactics are useful for balancing out experience, but you can also take it a step above this as well. I tend to think of each enemy unit as offering a set amount of exploitable experience points. If I attack an enemy and kill it in one go, one character gains all the experience. If I let other units attack in multiple turns then I share the experience. If I let the enemy attack my units, particularly the ones which can’t respond (attacking an archer at close range, for instance) then I get a wee bit extra experience out of an enemy unit and also have the option of getting my healers to heal the damage taking. Notice how with a little bit of extra planning I can get exploit the enemy to spread and/or increase the potential amount of experience I can get from a single enemy unit?
Support Conversations
Support conversations are a mystical part of the Fire Emblem games that I’ve never quite been able get much use out of. The basic idea is this, you recruit quite a large squad and in that squad there are pre-existing relationships or new relationships bloom from the ravages of battle. When two people with a relationship stand next to each other in battle for a set number of turns, they’ll encourage each other and their stats will increase. The conversations that occur are called support conversations and they can happen 3 times between 2 characters, each time upping a support rank from C to A. Each character has a fixed set of other characters that they can have these conversations with.
Support conversations give another dimension to the levelling up system. Those players who are willing to exploit this system need to choose their party based on friend relations and then organise their strategies around friend partnering.
Personally, I like how support conversations add in another layer of optional depth. Considering, however, that it can take 20-30 turns of two characters standing next to each other to rise one rank, the system has minimal precedence. It would be better if the number of turns were reduced, particularly for the initial C to B ranks so as to encourage more players to use the system. As it stands it seems severely under-utilised.
Gaining New Recruits
The player gains new recruits to their party in two main ways. The first is new characters finding their way into the main narrative and automatically joining your ranks. Since these characters are important to the standard narrative that all players experience, they are usually mandatory units in your party for their debut battle.
The second is talking to people of interest on the battlefield and convincing them to join your army. There are two types of people that you can self-recruit to join your ranks: civilians and enemies. Civilians are people who wind up unintentionally caught in the conflict. You can find them in houses or walking about on the battlefield identified by their green colour. Civilians don’t attack the player and take their turns like regular units in the “Other Phase”. Enemies are, as you’d expect, on the other team and trying to kill you.
Converting civilians and enemies over to your party can be thought of as an optional side objective to each battle. You don’t need actually these additional characters to advance the core narrative, but their fate (if they are converted, aren’t converted or die) does end up having an impact on the story in some form. Whether it be them dying and having no impact, joining your party and forming relationships or continuing on to assist the enemy in forwarding their dastardly scheme.
The process of recruitment has two parts 1) identify which of your characters may be able to talk to the potential “convertee” (ie. what similarities do they have with your current squad members based on the clues dropped in dialogue) 2) physically move said unit next to potential “convertee” and talk to them. What makes recruiting challenging is actually trying to talk to the unit without killing them or letting them be killed. Civilian units can be attacked by enemy units, so you really need to reach them first. Enemy units though, are even more difficult to convert. They’ll attack you and as a result you will automatically attack back which may or may not permanently put them out of commission. So you need to corner the enemy in a spot where you can’t accidentally kill them (or they can’t reach you), but can move in and talk. Of course, if you make it this far only to send in a unit that has actually no relationship with the potential new recruit then you’ve foiled the plan and need to start all over again. Like most of these examples, recruiting these optional characters is just that, optional; it’s an offer for players to increase the difficulty if they so wish.
Personal Goals: Unit Numbers
Once the player builds up a significant party of units the game gives the option of selecting units, choosing their placements, observing the map and trading inventory in preparation before the battle begins. Under the unit selection part of the menu, the player can choose which units they wish to use in battle from a maximum allotment. While the player can’t exceed that upper limit, they can put as little as a single unit into battle. For players who want to only level up set units exclusively and aren’t worried about the challenge, they can send out just the number of units they need into battle. On the other hand, some players may wish send out fewer units just for the challenge of it.
Personal Goals: Number of Turns
Fire Emblem operates on a turn-based system. Once the player has used each unit once or chooses to end their turn, it’s the enemy’s turn and so on. While only a few levels require the player to actually finish the game in a number of turns, players can scale the difficulty by trying to complete missions in as few turns as possible. Considering that perma-death (see next article) will likely cause more than a few hard resets, players will likely warm to this idea in completing each battle as quickly as possible due to the length of time they can drag out for.
Tower and Monster Encounters
New in Fire Emblem Sacred Stones are the Tower of Valni and Lagdou Ruins. These two areas (I haven’t yet reached the latter so I’m making assumptions about it for now) can be accessed via the world map and offer additional battles that can be played between chapters. These battles are against monsters and don’t have any narrative to them. Once the player is granted access to these areas, the game suggests using them to level up units for battle. For newer players these areas can be used to quickly grind characters up to par, while veteran players can try and conquer the higher, more difficult levels.
In addition to these two areas, monsters will spawn on the overworld map ala Final Fantasy Tactics. New players can also seize these opportunities to level up characters and practice their strategies.
Conclusion
These examples demonstrate two things about the character of Fire Emblem Sacred Stones and the series at large. The first is that the series is openly willing to welcome new players and provide the type of customised game experience so that they can slide right in (selectable difficulty, tower and monster encounters, promoted classes early on as crutches). Equally, we can see that Fire Emblem‘s system of strategy on its own is also flexible enough to support varied, advanced play (experience sharing/exploiting, class exploiting, support conversations and new recruit sub goals) for those who want it without impeding play for those who just wish to play at a normal level.
Additional Links