In the rare event that a Fire Emblem player lets a unit stay dead, the game should at least let ꧃them know they're a monster.
Very few fans of the Fire Emblem💎 series can honestly say they've never🧔 restarted a chapter to keep a unit alive. In fact, the frequency with which players do just that is likely one of the driving forces behind mechanics like Mila's Turnwheel and the Divine Pulse being added to the two most recent entries in the franchise. Even the players who commit to playing classic mode don't always just accept their losses when they beat a chapter imperfectly.
Just because the fans feel the pressure to keep units alive, though, doesn't mean Intelligent Systems is doing their best to make them feel it. In a lot of recent games, characters, and in turn character deaths, have been polarized - plot-relevant characters can't die, just become undeployableꦛ, and characters who are less plot relevant barely show up within the story at all, so they can ✃die while barely affecting anything but your list of available units. While the divide is understandable, we think the latter point needs to change: if a player lets someone 'less important' die, the game should at least make more of an effort to rub their nose in it.
Death quotes are a good example of the consequence a Fire Emblem game can assign to death. If you already like a character, or find their death quote particularly tragic, these quotes can influence your emotional reaction to losing the unit. But what do death quotes really accomplish when a player doesn't like (or hasn't spent time getting attached to) the character saying them? Let's take 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Three Houses' Lorenz, for example. He's not particularly popular. So a lot of people might just let him go gentle into that good night if he happens to eat a critical hit near the end of a long or difficult chapter. Here's where an alternative route to guilt might be more impactful: having the surviving characไters remark on it when someone's been killed in action.
Path of Radiance, released for the Game Cube in 2005, had a number of alternate dialogues prepared just in case you happen to be the world's worst commander in the early game. This includes a heartbreaking line from Rolf, the younger brother of two starter units who can perma-die in early levels, about his missing siblings. In fact, there were enough alternate conversations in the early game to fill a YouTube video for those unwilling to kill off Greil's Mercenaries themselves. While some units are plot armored and can't die, like Titania and Soren, the characters who did die are still mentioned in the story beꦅats of the game.
Moments like these are taking advantage of Fire Emblem's foundation: unlike many other games in the tactical genre, the characte▨rs you're controlling aren't nameless, cookie-cutter soldiers. They're typically given numerous relationships and aspirations through the su꧃pport conversations you can unlock. So to preserve this sense that "everyone you send into battle is a person," Fire Emblem works best emotionally when consequence (death) is felt keenly even when it's not a major plot element.
These moments are by no means absent in recent games, though. In Three Houses, Dorothea has a fantastic monastery conversation after the if you've recruited her for the Azu𓃲re Moon or Verdant Wind routes where she grieves for Ferdinand, who she hadn't even liked in their student days. And a lot of characters have special conversations for when they're meeting an old friend in combat. These are good, gripping conversations: but they're also completely🌺 reliant on a high degree of prior investment.
If you want to get Marianne and Hilda's heartbreaking Crimson Flower exclusive combat dialog, you have to have a Marianne that can stand toe-to-toe with a boss unit. The conversation between Mercedes and the Death Knight is even more complicated to achieve, for much the same reason. When are you going to send your healer in to fight a boss with infinite co𒀰unter range? In other words, many of these special combat conversations can be hard to find organically in a normal playthrough.
Because of this hurdle in unique combat dialog, conversations like Dorothea's, that can be heard off the battlefield, are important. More than that, conversations like Mist and Rolf's, which take place as part of the story of the game and are seen in order to progress, are extremely worthwhile for emotional beats to la👍nd while at the same time providing great motivation for keeping units alive.
Although we live in the age of player-protagonists, which can make it hard to include extensive (emotional) dialog while balancing immersion, the othe💝r lord characters in ♛Fire Emblem could still stand to react a little more during story beats when one of their friends falls in action. If the protagonists don't feel bad when their friends die on the battlefield, what makes them any different than the enemy commanders?