kinda weird timing for a new video on NYE. But hey! I am here. first video back since I moved. Hope you enjoy and appreciate my thoughts! thanks for watching :) Subscribe: goo.gl/1xHJzR Patreon: www.patreon.com/GhastPatreon Please check out my Patreon if you'd like to help support me this year!
Just don't use it, people keep trying to push a narrative of the game being "not punishing enough". Everyone should play how they want within the confines of the game and you shouldn't complain about changing the quality of life mechanic to make it less worth reaching for lmao.
It's funny because my favorite thing about the turn wheel mechanic is misclicks. I got me some bad butterfingers, and I've lost count of how many times of lost units because of them.
I find the turn wheel to be more of a “Hey, now I don’t have to fully reset the game” and found it helpful for me to learn and develop my own strategies in a faster manner. I also enjoy just being able to experiment without necessarily having to fully reset. I do think they should have a menu option to let people turn it off completely and just game over if a key character dies, for those players who want it off entirely, but I appreciate that it exists as a mechanic and wouldn’t wanna lose it entirely either.
The best answer would be to actively reward the player for completing maps without using too many rewinds. But, the harder the map, the more leeway you get with how many rewinds you can use before you lose the reward.
@@paperluigi6132 I don’t think they are going to do that or at least not anymore. The best option is to have a choice to turn it on or off. That way people on both sides can be happy.
@@1stCallipostle I mean, I'm not sure this statement is so accurate because theoretically, the way its meant to be played is that dead people stay dead. We're just all refusing to allow our friends/pawns to die.
Here's an idea: how about rewarding the player for their unused charges? That way you can use it to protect your invested characters but are less tempted to use them on inconsequential flubs. The reward could be something simple like bonus gold or exp, or it could be something like points you can spend at a special shop or material necessary to repair rare weapons.
I wish BEXP would return. Especially with how they're pushing the sandbox aspect in the latest games. Having an incentive to keep rewind uses is an excellent idea.
Goddamn, I love this idea. It would be a cool solution, because plenty of people could continue using the turnwheel as a QOL feature, but there would always be that voice in the back of your head: "what if I challenged myself to make it through without it"
Even in older fire emblems I use to just restart the whole mission over because I become attached to characters. The turn wheel really just eliminates the requirement of restarting the whole mission over so it kind of respects my time in that aspect. However I don't think people inherently drop the strategic side of the game because I know when I do mess up and have to rewind I then kick into overdrive and make sure that doesn't happen again.
This was kinda what I was thinking too. People have always been resetting maps in their Fire Emblem playthroughs, but now that resetting is introduced mechanically those same people find it offensive for some reason. I don’t get it.
@@auraguard0212 Is that really true because I remember having to reset so many times playing Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn. It feels like the whole series is based around resetting, even Fire Emblem Heroes. Rewinds just make it less tedious, but people could still reset if they wanted.
Frankly, losing a character was never an option to me. I've reset a mission over 30 times once until I managed to clear it without deaths. *It's not about "losing an unit you've invested in". It's about losing a character in a RPG.* I will go to any length to avoid that. The Rewind mechanic is just what I've been doing since my first game, Sacred Stones, but faster. In short, I just wanted to say that "more characters" is no solution. Whether there are 20 characters or a whole 100 makes no difference if you're playing for everyone to survive.
^ The culture of FE is so much more different than these sorts of videos realise. The vast majority of the player base doesn't care for things like rankings, or honesty or whatever. Especially as the series has gone on, more and more people refuse to accept friendly unit deaths.
@@fillerpoint555 The for lack of better terms "Get good" Side of the FE community really forgets how people play the games. Like in all the rewind conversation no one brings up that the majority of the players of FE before this point reset on any unit death, even characters they didn't particularly like.
In the older games you couldn’t reset turns just chapters. The punishment for losing a character was restarting the chapter or moving on without the character. That was fire emblem at its core. Being able to rewind to specific turns takes that away in my opinion.
@@StrategyMaster17 that’s not a good punishment tho. Find another way to disincentivize players from spamming the turn wheel, but making me go through pointless loading screens and repeat stage dialogue is infuriating. It doesn’t make me want to get better at the level, it makes me exponentially lose interest with each mistake as the game wastes my already limited time I can spend playing games.
@@StrategyMaster17 as someone who has played every game in the series, for many players who like keeping every character alive at all costs, a harder punishment will not fix things. In my first run of awakening(which was my first game in the series) I played it blind and let a few characters die but by the time fates came out and I had already played the gba games, I was already resetting on deaths. Truthfully, it’s a bad habit but I enjoy having turnwheel to save time on these things but I feel like reducing turnwheel uses is a good method for creating strategic difficult while also having a chance to keep everyone alive
I think the biggest issue people miss about the decision to reset vs let a unit die is that many players aren’t looking for what is “viable” to do. Sure it may be worth it but many people drawn to the series after awakening and especially 3 Houses find the main draw of fire emblem as the characters, even above gameplay. Letting their favorites die is a complete non option that wouldn’t be fixed with more late game units. I think the ranking system and save/turn wheel points on the map are probably the best solution to this. I’d also love to see the turn wheel toggleable when you start the game.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The series' focus on character storytelling, S rank supports, and sheer volume of support conversations show where Intelligent Systems is placing their games' value. In the earlier titles, many units didn't really have personalities. There were no support conversations and you were getting practically 2-5 recruits every other map. They built those games to have named units die, even though those named units were really just generic soldiers with anime hair. But fandom does what fandom does and started picking apart and celebrating recruitable units. Everyone has a favorite character, everyone has a favorite support and battle quote, etc. The series has never been more popular than it is today and IS knows why. I've never been invested in the permadeath system, only ever feeling regret from lost units of the past. They aren't a resource for me to throw away when necessary. Honestly, I think the best version of permadeath I've seen is from the new XCOM games. Your units have names and unique designs and battle quotes and you invest time into them. Every death still hurts and you want to make better choices in the future to prevent losing more of your favorites. But the XCOM soldiers aren't really comparable to all the handcrafted backstories and personalities of Fire Emblem rosters. Every FE unit feels like a piece of the greater whole, much more comparable to BioWare companions than generic soldiers in an RTS. IS kinda wants to have their cake and eat it too so we get these systems like mid-battle saves and time-rewind, classic versus casual mode, so people drawn to the permadeath mechanic can enjoy it as much as those using FE as an interactive television show. How well they meet that middle, I guess that's up to the individual.
One of the core features that made FE unique amongst other SRPG's was permadeath. No one WANTS their favourite characters to die cause of a mistake they made, instead it's adds another layer of strategic depth to gameplay, where the player ensures they reach an outcome where everyone can live. It's one of the many reasons FE become the most popular and probably longest running SRPG franchise. With Engage being a game that "celebrates" the franchises history, I would've been neat to have a more traditional experience by just making the turnwheel an option you can turn off especially if you choose the classic difficulty in the first place.
Just from a psychological standpoint it would be better to reward the player for not using the turnwheel, rather than punish them for using it. Personally giving the player bonus XP or money depending on how many turnwheel uses they have leftover is going to be more effective at mitigating over-reliance on it. As opposed to a positive punishment approach as you're suggesting, where you give a player a low rank to discourage them from using the turnwheel.
I'll be honest when losing a character I've never once thought about my investment into there stats or the time training them. It's always about losing the character and that's something I'm not gonna let happen because there is zero incentive to let that happen. It could be my least favorite character on an incredibly tedious map and I'm still gonna restart. Divine Pulse just saves time.
Gotta be honest, as someone who enjoys playing FE blind on the hardest modes, I really enjoy the divine pulse systems. Being able to play through the game without knowing about ambush spawns and the like ahead of time makes you hold on tight to those charges and makes you think about every rewind charge critical. I massively prefer it to the infinite resets that occurred during my Awakening Lunatic + runs, for instance. I can see how this system could make permadeath less of a thing on lower difficulty runs, but with the lengths of the maps in 3 houses, I definitely prefer lower instances of permadeath to 50 minute + map resets. Anyways loving the videos ad always Ghast, Happy New Year!
My counter to that would be that intelligent systems should just design less BS moments like that. My problem with the turn wheel is that I feel like it influences the design of the levels because they know the player has a safety net.
@@TheNerdyGinger I totally agree that it overly influences their design, but for me at least I like the idea of SOME of the BS elements being included. It adds to the immersion of the maps and the campaign for me. Enemies setting REAL, merciless ambushes is very thematic for the kind of war stories that FE generally tells. In the case of 3 houses in particular, it felt very thematic that the person most capable of single handedly turning the tide of the war was the person who can slightly manipulate time. I don't necessarily think IS has ever hit the sweet spot of balancing the turn wheel systems in a way that feels completely satisfying, but I do think there are alot of positives that could POTENTIALLY come from a system like it. Maybe if it's importance and power was more reined in than we have seen it in the past it could provide a satisfyingly new layer to the series' strategy, but so far it has seemed very all or nothing.
The best intro of the turn base game is Xcom enemy unknown. Literally watch your team die. Turn your heart into stone and use your units like resources.
@@raychii7361 that's not true, in fact you get attached to your units as they level up and become better assets, and considering that you can customize the looks of them is another plus to that. If you really want a tactical game where your units have no value above strategic convenience and ease of use, then that's Famicom/advance wars.
@@carlostejeda4341 Yeah yeah. But they are still resources. I'm sure you wouldn't think twice sacrificing a weaker unit to save your investment. The tutorial of XCOM kill your squad to make it clear how unforgiving the game is.
I think a way to fix the rewind safety net is to reduce the uses depending on difficulty. Normal can have the normal 9 or so uses, Easy can have unlimited because why not, Hard can have maybe 3 or 4 and then your Maddening equivalent can either have 1 use or no uses all together. If the player is up for the challenge of harder difficulty, reduce how many times they can use the safety net. But that’s just my two cents.
I agree, whenever someone says “reduce the amount” they say it for all difficulty which wouldn’t help the newer players, and you need to have newer players come into the franchise to keep it going. So have it scale bc I doubt new players would choose maddening mode from the get go anyway
But reducing the uses doesn't really fix the problem created by divine pulse, it just reduces the severity. I personally want to play a game without it, but in your proposed solution, I'm only allowed to do that if I play on the hardest difficulty. I don't always like playing the same difficulty though. Conquest is the game I come back to most often and I don't always pick Lunatic. I do sometimes, but I play on Hard often as well, and I enjoy them both and it's a part of the game's replayability. Instead of doing it based on difficulty, it should just be it's own separate option. When the game starts and asks you what difficulty you want to choose and between casual and classic. Ask a third question about divine pulse, Infinite, normal, or none. (You can add "Reduced" as an option as well if you want but that might be too many choices with too little distinction and cause choice paralysis.) You can always change your option later in the difficulty settings too.
I strongly disagree. I enjoy games that are extremely difficult, but not punishing, meaning a mistake causes a loss, but a loss only going back a short bit. Playing on easier difficulties is boring because your units will just slaughter all enemies with no thought needed. Playing without turnwheel is just annoying because one small mistake means replaying an hour long map. The complaints about turnwheel are silly. Either 'I don't like turnwheel and I am incapable of just not using it, so nobody should have it', or 'I play the game this way and everybody else should have to play the same way'.
@@jamesjett8050 Luck is an integral aspect of the game and turnwheel completely minimizes that. Using risky poorly thought out strategies and then using turnwheel as a crutch for when they go wrong absolutely makes the game a lot easier overall.
I like the rewind stuff because I dont have the time or patience to care about arbitrary rankings and I like having the option of seeing the multiple unique dialogue exchanges from the related characters meeting in battle in a much more accessible way. Also I kind of become detached from the games whenever I lose a character. FE4 and FE6 was a miserable playthrough for me but I grew attached to the Tellius cast because I tried my damnest to keep everyone alive, and seeing them in both games feels nice
It really is a convenient feature for people who value the characters & story. Like, Fire Emblem is a Social Sim now. I don't want the characters I spent dozens of hours talking to and appreciating just disappearing because I made an oops in combat or being so worthless that they have 3 clones available throughout the game. Like, either call the series something new or let the people who just want a TRPG go find an indie project that keeps permadeath and intense challenge the focus.
I agree. I think a lot of hardcore veterans forget that everyone doesn’t think like them and that there’s people who play Fire Emblem for the story and characters, not to receive extreme challenges. I think everyone should enjoy the game for the aspects of it that they love the most. If someone likes Fire Emblem for the tactical challenge and brutal difficulties, they can still have that by ramping up their difficulty and neglecting to use the turn wheel. But if someone is a casual player and just wants to enjoy the game without a huge hassle, then they have the option available to play things safer so their own experience isn’t bogged down by difficulty. It’s a win for both sides, so I really don’t understand why people get so angry over the system itself.
@@powpowouchy5 You can still lose battles on casual easy. Rewinding isn’t used solely for saving characters from death, it’s to help you correct other mistakes, too.
@@Curlorly06 dude, it is nearly impossible to lose on casual easy. In fact, you’re more likely to completely lose on classic/hard with the turnwheel than casual easy without it. “It’s to help you correct other mistakes too”. So you basically want a game where you have absolutely no accountability or consequences for your actions? Sure ok. Just make that another optional mode for people who don’t like the strategy aspect of the strategy game.
I think a good way to try and balance the turnwheel is instead of starting with all of the uses at the start of the map, instead earn them by making progress through the map. This way it works kind of like the save points in the DS games where you have to get to certain points to be able to use it.
This idea seems interesting, like having a few uses at the beginning and every X amount of turns that pass gain Y amount of uses. Or complete an objective/play according to the map's design, like "we should warn the villages" (while the win condition is to rout the enemy, though that might make bonus objectives more of a necessity) and for every village visited you gain Y amount of uses.
@@bubbles784 I could get behind the idea of having a few starting uses (I'm leaning towards 3) and earning more through the completion of side objectives. I fondly remember Radiant Dawn's use of side objectives that rewarded extra Bexp, though it could've been way better explained at the time.
@@brawlfan9999 Nah I think it should be only 2 at start MAX if they did it like this, because the start of maps are generally the easiest and wont really force you to use them up very early, you could just horde them and get more for the harder parts of the map. I also feel like if they did something like this they should reduce the amount you have depending on difficulity, hardest difficulty giving you 1 rewind at start and only 1 or 2 to earn through the rest of the map, while lower difficulties have more to be more forgiving and for newer players who will probably stick to those for quite a while. Idk having 3 at start and able to get more than that? It would be just as broken as it is in 3H except arguably even more because Emblems exist. 3 at start on Easy/Normal, sure, but on Lunatic/Maddening? Nah that's just too much for a mode that's supposed to be a challenge.
Pretty much my sentiment: Turnwheel was good on Echoes because small team + bad hit rates and tight stat benchmarks often times doesn't give players the option to make up for bad RNG. No staffs, only one healer, no canto etc. The inherent problem is the design of modern Fire Emblem: Whereas the games were balanced around you losing units in the past, they are now designed to specifically invest into units that become irreplaceable. A big part of the strategy aspect is the long term thinking on where to bring those units that the progress of the game hinges on. As an example, Thracia 776 also encouraged long term planning but more by limiting resources. 'Do you want to remove the sleep status now or would you save the use for later? Do you want to take this unit along and have them be fatigued next chapter?' while also providing limited supplies of items to bypass some of these mechanics like the S Drink or scrolls (that also negate RNG BS) so the player doesn't get stuck so easily. To me, it looks like Fire Emblem doesn't know what it wants to be: A build-up strategy game or a strategy game with random elements that also accounts for it. Currently, it seems like it wants to be both, which is kept together with duct tape (turn wheel)
Unfortunately, the loss of Kaga as part of the development team might have gradually derailed the direction of the franchise the further it moves on and with more ideas that clash with older design philosophies.
I think it’s pretty weird that echoes introduced turn rewind when that game already has a much better system for mitigating permadeath imo with the Lion shrines. Also I never thought of Fates’ child units that way. Makes me appreciate them more
For me personally, I'd like all available hands on deck, so to say. If a unit falls in battle it means less units on the field. With the rewind mechanic at least there's the option to keep a unit in play instead of after the fact, you know?
Yeah the entire system is bad I think, they already had better solutions to the same problem in earlier games, and even another one in TearRing Saga which is a game that fe7 already ripped off a bunch of things from, but never that mechanic specifically. There is also a free save every 5 turns in Berwick Saga, recently FE has just chosen the worst possible solution to this particular issue that disrupts the game's design and balance far more than any of the other possible solutions.
I personally think the only reason they implemented turn wheel the way they did was to make the late game/post game labyrinths more bearable. That you can refresh them by offering to mila statues makes it feel like turn wheel is balanced around long dungeon dives, rather than the traditional chapter format.
Thing is, when use the turnwheel/divine pulse, I don't do it because "I invested resources into the unit", it's because I don't want that CHARACTER to die, because I am emotionally invested. And with the characters get more development in newer games, I get less incentive to let them stay dead.
Yeah that's why letting units die works better in the older games because some of these characters have very little personality and are more of a resource. But with the voice acting now there is so much more life and charm in the characters now than those from older entires, hence why you don't want to see them die.
Yes this is the main reason. Older fire emblem games the characters did not really have developed personalities. They are really no more than a group of stats that you could replace with another unit with similar stats. Newer games people get invested in the characters themselves so that even if another character with exactly the same stats is available you will have lost the character who you have the connection and relationship to.
There just isn't an incentive to leave them dead. Why should I get less options for a death that WILL NEVER MATTER. Like most of the time the only thing that changes with a character death is the Epilogue screen.
*Having underlevelled units gain levels much more rapidly* could certainly help, especially if *combined with an adjutant mechanic like in 3H.* If you can already carry a few reserves from your regular adjutants and then also catch up a unit within 1 to 3 maps, even if that unit is level 1 near endgame, that should help mitigate things alot.
Triangle Strategy did a huge amount of experience rubber-banding like this. It's convenient, but I actually think that's a problem. If any unit can catch up that quickly, it doesn't actually matter at all if they're underleveled. If you lose a character you've invested a lot in, and can just replace them by spending a couple chapters speed-grinding a low level unit up to par, it kind of takes away from the impact of the original character's death. If there's always a bevy of easy replacements to choose from, it becomes difficult to care about losing a unit. Ultimately, a balance needs to be struck, and that's what's so difficult about this issue. Losing a character needs to be a big event, something that matters a lot. But the player also needs a way to recover from that death that doesn't involve resetting the game. Resetting and replaying the same chapter is boring game design. The death of a character needs to be woven into the gameplay loop in such a way that the game can continue and perhaps even become more interesting once a character dies. And that's also a huge challenge.
@@sand5527 I agree with you about experience rubber banding. In a game without permadeath and infinite grinding it's fine, desirable even. It really works in Stella Glow, letting you use whatever characters you want for any mission which is great because every single unit in that games has completely unique abilities. Fire Emblem however bases it's strategy heavily on the idea of risk versus reward. Weapon durability provides you with the reward of using a strong weapon with the risk of needing it for a critical situation later when it might be broken. Alternatively you can have the reward of saving it for later, but the risk that your weaker weapon might not get the job done and depending on the situation, that can lead to some deadly consequences and it's up to the player to weigh that decision. Chests and Villages are a great example, playing slower is safer, but you may lose out on some very useful items, money, or even a new character. Jeigans, prepromotes, or otherwise higher leveled characters present a similar situation. You can beat the chapter without putting your weaker characters in danger, but if you do they won't get stronger and then well, as the Fire Emblem theme song's Japanese lyrics say, "Invest too much into your strongest warrior and those around him will all be weaklings." (Or something like that, I'm not great at Japanese.) Too much experience rubber-banding makes it too easy the catch up weak units and there's no reason to bother using them because you'll get so much experience later from a just a couple kills when you have a safe opportunity. Too little experience rubber-banding and the player will just juggernaut with strong characters because they're getting similar amounts of exp to the weak ones anyways. Arenas and BEXP allow you to power up weaker characters but still maintain an element of risk/reward. Fire Emblem is a strategy simulation game and it's important to provide the player with meaningful choices. Unit death is always subject to a large amount of context that is individual to each player's unique experience. Who died, how good are they, what level ups did you get, how far into the map are you, what other characters are available, and so on. Rebecca and Wil are pretty interchangeable but I'm far more likely to reset for Rebecca just because she's hot. Nolan might die in Part 1 endgame and you may consider resetting because he's one of the few characters in the Dawn Bridgade with reliable bulk, but you're near the end of the map, got all the chests and none of the thieves escaped, Micaiah got a blessed level with Hp, defense, and speed, your Nolan is two speed below average, you've saved up a bunch of BEXP for later, and you've been training Aran this playthrough. You could also have the exact opposite situation, the thieves got away with the treasure, Micaiah got magic and res, you gave Nolan the dracoshield earlier, you used up all your BEXP two chapters ago, and you didn't recruit Aran. What's great is deciding to reset is a meaningful strategic decision where you weigh the value of your current progress versus the value of having that unit going forward. But because unit death in 3H has such a high punishment due to the large amounts of investment of limited resources that the entire game is built around, the correct choice is always reset. As a result, Divine Pulse had to be implemented as a QoL and accessibility feature to avoid players ragequitting the game because of the constant resetting despite the fact that it harms strategic integrity by eliminating the consequences of your decisions just like casual mode.
Another great thing about the Shadow Dragon battle saves is that you have to spend a unit's action on saving. So it must be a considered part of your strategy and decision making. Its really well incorporated into the game.
What I like from the ds games is their very large cast, it makes permadeath actually acceptable whereas in three houses the roster is much thinner especially after the timeskip It however goes against the fully voiced and fleshed out characters from echoes or three houses because it would require many more VA so idk
But this is what I take issue with. *They can easily afford more voice acting and spend more time writing dialogue, fleshing out supports, and expanding on these things.* That's what people seem to forget. They arent some basement-based indie developer working on pennies and cheap hardware (no disrespect to those folks btw, they're chads for pulling through of course), they're part of a large, massive company with a million dollar franchise. The issue isnt that they can't do it, it's that they won't let their developers have the time and resources to do it.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 no i disagree. Sure they have the budget to make more characters than they do but theres no way that the characters' depth wouldnt be hurt by an enlarged cast. Remember that you only have so many active units that yyou generaly bring into battle and idealy you would want at least most of those units that have some supports with most other units on your main team so they acctually feel like real characters in your army outside of the protag. The more characters you add the more likely it is that the character might end up with no supports in your army. It can already feel like that a little in three houses depending on what units you recruit in which runs so increasing the roster by a lot would no doubt guarantee characters like that
@@thisisanamedontjudge329 This is why you take time to iron all of that out. I'm sorry, but time and effort really do make a difference a lot of the time. I agree that it would still be hard to do, and maybe the cast doesnt have to be as big as FE1's cast, but they can still afford to not only flesh out the units, but to make an army FEEL LIKE AN ARMY and not a smattering of units that barely classify as two DND parties of adventurers in size. Awakening seemed to handle that issue just fine honestly, and that game had a decently chunky cast size for what its worth.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 What y9u said is true but at the same time if you end up with too many characters their respective part in the story will be reduced, Three Houses and Echoes already had a hard time making some characters story relevant beyond one or two chapters It seems like Engage will go on the smaller roster route, so maybe we'll get a bigger fully voiced cast would be the genealogy remake (copium intensifies)
In my case I usually just restart if someone dies because of the character itself, and not because of their stats or time invested. The odd exception is Shadow Dragon , with all those gaiden chapters though. I kinda ended up *enjoying* offing some characters just to see what would come up in them.
So it’s basically… “Well if you don’t like it, don’t use it.” “Well how will I know if I don’t like it if I don’t use it?” “THEN JUST STOP DOING STUFF!”
I’m Bonus EXP’s biggest fan and I want it to come back as a new way of incentivizing less reliance on turn rewind. Didn’t use turn rewinds? Get a lot of B.exp for it. B.exp has always rewarded good play which would fit great with a system as forgiving as turn rewind
I disagree, especially if map design and strategic thinking is suffering massively because of it. Of course, if it's optional, then we can talk shop, as in its a pre-gameplay option when making a new save file, and if you select no, it wont be usable, ever.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958why not just ignore it? It seems like a waste of memory space to make it so you can turn it off and on so it would be better if it was just there and can be ignored instead.
@@shadeofthenight8988 I dont see how it wastes any significant memory space to just flip a flag switch that blacks out the option or makes it selectable respectively during pre-game difficulty selection. Also, temptation is a bastard, like, not everyone can simply not use it.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 I do get what you mean in that sense. In Pokemon X/Y the same debate was had with the modified Exp Share. People said "just turn it off", but as you say, temptation is a bastard.
I'm not going to lie, I absolutely used Divine Pulse to reset, and even played on Casual pretty much all the time, because I loved the characters and didn't want them to die...and I definitely just yolo'd them into high risk high reward situations.
I’ve only played two FE games, the first being 3H and the second being the FE1 localization, and I was surprised at how generally accepting I felt having units die without access to Divine Pulse That being said, I didn’t really think my overall experience with FE1 was all that positive, so I probably have to play another, better game to get my real opinions
I appreciate that you were at least amicable to losing some units. Thats a mindset I wish more fans, modern ones espcially, had. I think FE1 is a good entry, but definitely a product of its time. I recommend FE7 or 8 as your next entry, as those have decent sized casts too :)
I don't think that's a fair-viewpoint since FE1 has literal throw-away characters and more than half the cast are complete garbage you want to die anyway.
@@VioletLunaChan Yeah, and its also the first game in the whole franchise, it set a solid basework for future games to follow, so obviously we arent saying it should just be copied shot for shot on that front. What modern games are doing isnt taking inspiration and working from what was established, theyre abandoning it and are even scared of it.
One other important thing to point out about the SoV turnwheel vs. 3H Divine Pulse is that in SoV you could not turnwheel if Alm or Celica died. It was just an automatic game over. Divine Pulse, on the other hand, allows you to rewind no matter what, even if Byleth or any lords or other game over condition units die. If the rewind mechanic is going to stick around, I think it should follow the SoV system. You still get to rewind in most situations, but there is still an element of risk.
That may have the unintended consequence of handicapping the main character. A fair number of people who tier sov characters give alm an celica lower ratings simply because they can't be turnwheeled and can't change their starting tile. Personally i think fe has enough games where the main character is in the bottom half of all characters.
"It's just a convenience thing! Now I can just save the time I would have spent resetting!", says the player who charges in with zero strategy and turns back time 9 times each map to mess with the rng until they're able to avoid any punishment whatsoever.
Honestly the turn rewinding mechanic is great. It avoids having to do a full reset of a level for just making a small mistake, it removes the frustration of random one-shots due to bad crit RNG, and it removes the annoyance of the AI overwhelming a powerfull unit out of nowhere (nothing is quite as annoying as a tank who should've been fine unexpectedly dying because the AI manages to hit in 10 back-up attacks in a single turn) And 99% of the playerbase will never even begin to abuse it, because even with infinite rewinds brute-forcing a level would be boring and time-consuming. The only thing I'd consider adding to it is maybe some reward for saving charges. It won't stop people from rewinding on deaths, but it will discourage people from attempting stupid stuff just because they know they'll be safe if it inevitably doesn't work.
Tactics Ogre Reborn does this rewinding a lot better I feel. It's always there for you to us, but you get extra rewards if you never use it during the whole campaign. You also get a reward for not letting a single unit killed, so you have to choose between the two when you're doing your campaign. But since in Tactics Ogre you can recruit as many generic units as you want, it's a lot easier to let them go than in Fire Emblem where you grow attached to your characters. I've always loved the possibility to get generic units in Fire Emblem because they often look cool and add a neat twist to the global mix, because you don't really care if they die. That's why I love the Capture Mechanic from fates and I hope it will be back on Engage.
I really love the turn-wheel it's saved so much time as I am someone who resets even if a character I don't particularly like dies. Personally I have 2 ways in which I would like to see the turn wheel be addressed in the future. 1. Give rewards based on how many uses left after a chapter. Whether this be something as simple as gold or even the return of Radiant Dawn's Bonus EXP. I admit I am very reckless in modern fire emblem due to the turn-wheel. In Path of Radiance I would play much more defensively, whereas now I pretty much just go full-on attack and rewind when necessary. If rewards were given based on how much uses were left I know I would be a lot more strategically and methodical with any approach. 2. I'd love to see more resurrection fountains like in Echoes Shadows of Valentia. Maybe bringing back dead characters goes against the point of Permadeath, but it'd be another way in which we don't need to rely solely on turn-wheel uses. I'm honestly surprised Fire Emblem hasn't really toyed with the idea of bringing dead characters back to life more in the series.
My solution is usually to send in the armoured units first, so my only use for the turnwheel is if an enemy has an armourslayer or anti-armour mage I didn't see somehow ._.
I am very pro Turn-wheel but I do think the Bonus XP system is an amazing way to get the player to engage the maps in thematic ways and encourage the roleplaying element of the series. I would love the the Bonus XP system to return but now clearly laying out what you need to do because people will just post it online, why bother hiding it.
@@SapphicSara I would honestly fully embrace the permadeath mechanic if the characters would actually react when somebody dies. How is it roleplaying when one of the characters in a tightly knit party dies and nobody bats an eye?
I think limiting the uses is a very good middleground solution. I remember playing Cindered Shadows and that DLC was the hardest maps I've ever faced in the entire series. It was very fun, very satisfying. You had limited resources which impacted it a lot, but the turnwheel was also limited. Only had about 4 or so rewinds per map, so you could test a strat, and rewind if it went bad or you got RNG screwed, but it was limited before you inevitably had to restart. In the main campaign, you get like 12 rewinds per chapter. If we are having more of them, then we should count the enemy turn as 1, but each player movement as one as well, so you can't just restart back to the beginning of the chapter for 1 single use (though at that point restarting is better anyway). I think it's a good mechanic that can help with misinputs and stuff, something I wanted back in the GBA days, but I agree that it's gotten out of control. Hoping we can find a healthy middleground.
This is kind of off topic, but I liked the ability to abuse divine pulses for rerolling bad level ups in 3H. If you played well enough to have surplus pulses you can invest those in better level ups. So maybe coming at it from the other side of rewarding non-use could be an idea, like selling your rerolls if you don't need them. (In case anyone is wondering how to reroll levels in 3H, here's how: Levels are rolled at the start of a map. So it's impossible to reroll a level during a map, but you can still undo a level and then simply not level up that unit on that map for a fresh roll on the next map.)
Honestly I don't see a problem with how it is. I like it because it lets me just rewind a turn or two when I lose a unit, instead of resetting the whole map. Instead of just playing on casual and throwing all my units at the enemy without caring, I can play on classic and still have to care about my units and strategize, without redoing everything if I mess up. Does it *really* remove strategy when I still have to think and plan things out despite using it? I don't think so.
No it doesn't. Everything everyone says about more punishment causing you to play better is completely hypothetical. I feel like rewinding turns helps me to internalize better strategies by giving me a chance to experiment with a different approach in real time. In older FE's, I would just look up a guide or ltc if I had to reset a bunch. It was a super demotivating system.
When it comes to fire emblem I can see where people that are more used to the old systems are coming from with some aspects of the series becoming easier. That said the mechanic is needed now more than before. Why is pretty simple and that is that the series has changed as they put more effort into the characters than just the story. While in past games the characters was easily replaceable they was also much more one dimensional with little to the characters outside of maybe a few things. This was done as they was never meant to stay around like how in gen one pokemon no one ever kept the starter rat or bird and was expected to trade them in for a dodrio or tauros later in the game. In later games the characters became more and more characters with stories and development that if you let them die would be ruined especially if you liked a special character. If say hilda was your favorite you would not simply accept her death just to get a high score unless you was not a character type of guy or girl. While restarting is a possibility it would also become a pain especially on some maps where certain levels of RNG keep popping up such as a unit in place with a killer weapon that for some reason always crits and you can't get to him but he can get to you easy. I feel the system is trying to make one aspect of the game more fair than it was in past entries where it was more common for the game to punish you for its own faults whether that be unfair matchups you could not fix no matter what you did or RNG that for some reason kept popping up. Is the turnwheel broken.. to a degree as even in the best of times there was a bit of absurdity to how many times you could use or how far back you could go which lessing in the times or even cutting down on how far back you could go would help but over all the mechanic is much more fair that most I feel let on simply because the games feel easier. Great video tho.
My favorite memory in any recent fire emblem game was fighting the final post game boss of echoes and i had used up every last turn wheel i had available and i was almost done. It took every last micro calculation and an immense amount of care to win and prevent any unit deaths. I remember just shoving orange after orange into Alm's mouth to keep him alive. In this albeit very specific case, the turn wheel contributed to adding stakes and gave me a ton of enjoyment. Not to say it's implementation is fantastic or anything, but I think it accomplished it's intended design in that moment
Personally, If Intsys is going to be insistent on implementing the feature for accessibility reasons, then they should allow players to toggle it on/off when selecting the difficulty, eg. Hard-Classic-No Divine Pulse. Secondly, I think being able to rewind to any point in the battle is insanely broken, on higher difficulties there should be a max limit like only being able to reverse 3 turns. Additionally, the mechanic NEEDS to be a finite resource specifically on higher difficulties so that the player doesn't abuse it concurrently making sure the developers don't expect players to use the feature to get out of tough situations due to maps being designed around the mechanic since the player won't have enough anyways. My two cents fr.
My thoughts exactly. The whole point of casual mode is supposed to accommodate the newer players, and now IntSys are forgetting more about that with each passing entry. I can only advocate for divine pulses in the event of mis-clicks
@@zer0name720 I'm honestly sad that modern fire emblem is so scared of it's roots anymore. Like, I don't mind more casual experiences but this is going way, WAY too far at this point, and I fear for the next entry come the next year or two...
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 My sentiment exactly. FE is the most popular SRPG franchise on the planet, it shouldn't forget what made it reach such heights nor alienate those who supported it for years or even decades.
While not an ideal solution, I think I'd rather just have revives. Being able to both undo deaths and reverse time is a bit too powerful imo. With reviving you can have more risks, like having to use a units turn to revive another unit, have revives only give a unit half or even one health, have a revived unit not move after being revived, make revive magic cost health, have it so you can only revive on the next turn after death or else the unit rots, have map design and enemy placement so every turn counts. It still negates perma-death, but at least you can design strategy around it. Rewinding negates both perma-death and strategy. That said, I kinda appreciate the rewind feature for allowing you to reverse mis-clicks. Though I'd rather have it just be limited to undoing a unit's move provided that they haven't done an action like attacking/healing/etc.
A solution that doesn't seem all that talked about is to rework Classic and Casual mode to fit alongside the turnwheel. Currently, the turnwheel allows Classic Mode to basically be Casual Mode, because when a unit dies you can just go back. I would propose, instead of changing the turnwheel itself, just to recontextualize it. Make the only difference between Casual Mode and Classic Mode be that Casual has the turnwheel. Both have 'permadeath' in that deceased units don't come back, but allow the turnwheel as a resource when playing casually.
honestly I will have to disagree here for your argument, although it is valid. having played engage on hard classic without the time rewind for 10 chapters, it was simply annoying having to restart maps I failed in those 10 chapters. not because its annoying to play them again, but because of time. I simply don't have all that much time to give a map 2-3 hours retrying it, specially a long one. It was until chapter 10 in engage where I found myself using it finally, because that map took me 1 1/2 hours to get to the end where in that time I had a unit die by accident. via a misinput no less, I was punished by having a favorite character of mine killed. I was not about to replay the map again that day and spend 3 hours total to have another chance at it, and so I found myself using the rewind system finally, because I simply don't have the time to spend all day beating a map. doesn't help that I play slower than most, as I take my time deciding every move. I can't imagine an FE game being fun without the rewind system now just because of that honestly. I do think though that if people don't like the system, rather than punishing a player for using the system, they should reward the ones that don't. that could be a good compromise, other than that though, the rewind system is a timesaver for real.
I think that permadeath is honestly the thing that needs to be changed. Losing a unit is losing an asset you’ve invested time and resources in, but they’re also a character the player can become attached to. Even before the turnwheel, people were resetting maps to save characters. If IS made the concept of permadeath more interwoven in the game, it would make it more interesting to let a unit go. This could be like how echoes does it, where there is special after battle dialogue when a unit dies, and there are even different story scenes if characters die (like if Clair or Mathilda die in the chapters you recruit them.) Or they good do something tangible in gameplay, like slightly increased stats for units with high support with the dead character. Or, since there’s always a hub area now, have there be a graveyard with all the fallen characters, maybe even let there be funerals or characters grieving.
I love these ideas. I enjoy ironmanning XCOM much more than FE, and while part of that might just be that everyone is a generic in XCOM, another part might be that one little soldiers’ memorial screen that simply lists your dead soldiers.
I think one reason why Fire Emblem is going in the direction that its going is that games are just way harder to develop for, we expect high quality animations, voiceovers, background/lore and unique personalities for every character. If you want units to die and be replaced then you need to either give the game way more development time or make each individual character come with less features. Considering how popular Three Houses was, and the state of the industry now, I just can't imagine how they can ever go back at this point. In regards to Divine Pulse, I like it because it allows the player to play a lot more aggressively; putting your units into insane situations and seeing them come out alive is really cool. It does take away a lot of the tension though, as you barely ever have to seriously consider restarting a chapter except on the highest of difficulties. Ideally the game would be balanced so that DP isn't required, or maybe even some sort of reward for not using it at all.
That's sad because I really like the whole S support/children mechanic from awakening and fates and I want it to be back (along with beast and dragon units, I know is a different point but those are my favorite classes)
I'm very much a newcomer to the series (started with 3H, I know big surprise, and played Fates a decent amount although haven't finished that game), but even as a newcomer I felt the turn rewinding was way too powerful. Letting a character die is more of a question of "Will I bother saving them?" instead of being unable to save them. I do think there are some other additions/changes that can be made to fix this issue, that were not mentioned in the video. 1. Make death interesting. Something I was honestly baffled by was how little a character's death affects anything at all. Maybe I missed something (I think I only ever let a character die once permanently, since why would you), but I don't remember anything changing. As a simple example: if Felix dies, you would expect Ingrid to say something about, but as far as I know, she doesn't. Death could be made interesting in two ways: a. story. Add some flavour text for relevant characters mourning the character. Hell, maybe make a dynamic funeral scene for if a character dies. b. gameplay. This is an idea part of a game I have had in my head for some time (but for obvious reasons probably won't actually ever be made): modify relevant characters. Let's take Ingrid and Felix again. If ingrid dies: Felix gets significantly increased critical hit chance against archers, but significantly lowered hit chance against flying types (forgot the term, oops). It could even work as a bit of mechanic to help you, by not adding the negative change. To me it makes sense that the characters does not really become stronger or weaker, but instead changes, yet it could be used to help the player to not get into a negative spiral by making them exclusively stronger. Of course this would likely be a lot of work though. 2. Retreat mechanic. Again an idea for the game I have. Instead of a character immediately dying when hp reaches 0, the characters gets into a retreat state. Here they have either 1 hp or some small amount of secondary hp. They are unable to attack (maybe they can use support magic to heal, teleport away, etc.) but can run away. Then either you could have some square to get to where they can "retreat" so they are safe for the next battle (maybe even with a cooldown?) . You could also have them stay in that state instead and you have to babysit them (thus still a big negative to a character "dying"). And of course if they get hit (or get enough damage if they have more than 1 hp) in their retreat state, then they will permantly die. (I think that the enemies will have to ignore that character during the turn they get "killed", otherwise it might not help much anyway). Hence you still get punished and still have the risk/reward, but the risk is not instant, but very close to death. 3. Make rewinding cost. Possibly the turn rewind could be made an item that has to be bought which is one use only. The cost should evidently be high, otherwise it would be irrelevant. I think that it would also make a lot of sense for the cost to be dependant on the difficulty; make it cheap for easy, very expensive for hard. Anyway these are some ideas that I have been thinking about before.
the first part is interesting. normally, characters with plot relevance have plot armor and will retreat when defeated, except the lord whose death results in a game over. in older games, characters who die when defeated have no involvement in the plot after their recruitment. the main exception is matthew in blazing blade, as there is one scene (two if you play hector mode) that changes depending on whether he is alive or dead. what you ask is to make scenes like that more commonplace. i support that, and it would greatly help with immersion, but it would also take a lot of time and resources to account for every possibility (to cite your example. if ingrid replaces felix in some scenes, what happens if ingrid dies too?)
I definitely agree with making death more interesting. It's part of the intended gameplay loop, so losing a character should actually add something to the experience. You mentioned dialogue where characters mourn other characters, and they actually did take a tiny step in that direction in Fire Emblem 15. In that game, if you lose the mage Luthier, after the battle you'll get this soul-crushing voiceline when Delthea realizes he's dead. That was as far as they went with it, but even that small change made me more inclined to let characters stay dead. And there are games that constantly modify a character's stats based on what's going on. Darkest Dungeon is the first example that comes to mind. I agree that it's unlikely this will ever be done in an FE game, but you're right that they really could have character deaths modify the way other characters play. And yes, the turnwheel needs to cost a resource to use. It almost doesn't matter what resource, experience points, money, whatever, as long as the cost is high.
I feel ya. I like your ideas. Also I just have to say, I 100% agree with the whole story-not-changing-when-someone-dies thing. I felt the same in Awakening and Fates too. Like, everyone just continues on like nothing happened. "We won that battle! Yeah!" 5 minutes later a wholesome support about how happy go lucky the character is, etc. I understand that stuff is hard to change, because there's so much variance, but damn is it jarring when a character dies, and their best friend/husband/wife/child just has no reaction and goes on as if nothing happened.
For me, a new player. The option to rewind is fantastic. Whenever I make a mistake, I can instantly correct it, rethink and retry a different approach. A lot of the time, it’s not bad rng for me; it’s just lack of skill. Honestly as engage is the first game I’ve truly gotten a fair way through, I’ve actually had amazing rng; tons of 5%/10% crits, misses and the like. It makes me anxious about the other games if this is considered bad rng 😬
I personally don’t want to see the turnwheel altered or removed and here’s why. 1. It can be incredibly punishing to restart an entire chapter due to a unit dying. The majority of people playing are not going to let their units die especially as casts get smaller and more concentrated. As an adult with limited time and lots of games to play, its not reasonable for me to restart whole chapters or large sections of it, burning away several hours for nothing. If I didn’t have the option to save scum with turnwheel or save states in older games I would have never bothered to play the older Fire Emblem games that lack a casual mode. 2. Being able to negate a case of very poor luck (unlucky crits, whifs and hits) is extremely valuable and reduces a ton of frustration. 3. Being able to negate something like a misclick is super helpful because it does happen. 4. It lets me use more interesting strategies. Instead of going for the boring turtling approach I can do more offensive tactics without being too afraid of losing a unit. 5. Turnwheel is about the only counterplay besides resetting that you have against cheap ambush spawns. But I would prefer if ambush spawns never returned cause I hate them regardless.
Being entirely honest, I don't really mind Divine Pulse/Dragonic Time Crystal as long the game isn't forcing you to use the feature, which in 3Hs, can be argued to be kind of an issue given from Chapter 2's main mission onwards, the game *forces* you to use it every time Byleth dies. This might be a me thing, but it rubs me the wrong way when game developers, rather than providing optional features that can let more inexperienced people finish their games, instead decide to make such features *mandatory* , which, in an unrelated note, this is partly the reason why I eventually dropped from the latest mainline Pokemon games (seriously, I don't wanna play in Switch mode and with the Exp. Share always On). So I hope that Engage's Dragonic Time Crystal at least decides to keep the feature as it was with 3Hs' Divine Pulse (or heck, maybe even return to how SoV's Mila's Turnwheel did it).
I was about to mention Pokemon, and I wholeheartedly agree. The funny part is that I'm one of the people who WOULD use it because, guess what, I hate grinding with a passion outside of small bursts, but I don't exactly enjoy knowing others who dont want it are being forced to use it.
I've been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn and that game has a rewind feature, but I never use it because the game is actually well designed. If I'm struggling with a map, I usually reset the whole thing so I can reconsider my unit builds. It's clear that the new Fire Emblem games are designed with rewinding as a mechanic, not a feature. They should make good maps and gameplay with no consideration for rewinding. Three Houses, especially on maddening, felt like it was at least partially designed around rewinding and it sucked.
Divine Pulse does not need some sort of reward tied to not using it. Doing so would only go against the very purpose it was originally implemented in the first place; to save people from having to reset and replay a chapter. Tying a reward to not using divine pulse means when you make a mistake you will no longer get the max rewards at the end of a chapter and will want to reset the map to get full marks. It will no longer feel like a reward for not using it but rather it will feel like a punishment for using it.
I'll always advocate for FE11/12 save points to return because they require you to predict/account for future failures instead of being a band-aid solution of "oops i screwed up time to rewind" having to decide whether it's worth saving before a tough section, after a tough section so you don't have to do it again or even to solidify a super blessed level up you don't want to lose is a really interesting decision you have to make on the fly (and the added requirement of having to waste a unit's turn activating the save point can add further deliberation if you want to save on a frantic turn). It retains the series tension of "one mistake and you're dead" without making you face the heavy ultimatum of restarting a whole chapter from scratch or letting a unit stay dead. You're still always at risk of losing something to bad RNG/poor strategy but it's not nearly as severe which is a great middle ground imo.
Except that you have all the time in the world to save whenever you want and there's ALWAYS a save point near your starting position, meaning you always have a safe option in Literally every map I agree that it's better system than time rewinding altogether but it's still broken
Great video, glad to hear about FE4’s utilization of things. One extra thing I’d like to note is that in FE4, you can only save at the START of a turn, and one confirmed action locked you out of it. Along with this and FE4’s fixed seed RNG, it funnily made it so there was a “learning curve” to save scumming. I’m not saying every game should go this direction, but for FE4, the game wants you to use everyone and keep everyone alive, so that along with these choices makes me believe the game was made with save scumming in mind. You want a better level-up? You gotta learn how to progress the seed. Can’t get through the arena battle because you missed twice? Load the save and try things again in a different order. Save scumming in this sense isn’t really “exploiting” anything because the designers knew you would do it and thus chose how you would interact with it, making you still play by their rules as silly as it sounds!
If the main point of the turn wheel is to avoid mistakes or bad rng that would lead to the loss of a unit then what is the reason for having casual mode? I thought casual mode was introduced so that players wouldn't have to worry about losing units.
The turnwheel was invented to increase the pace of play. Before you could spend an hour just to get rng screwed and would have to reset and lose your past hour. You really lost nothing but time and it's a waste. Is the turnwheel over tuned? Yes, but is been an overall benefit. Hell many fe youtubers use save states when playing older fe games because it saves time. Casual mode is mostly for people truly struggle with the turn-based genre. I had a friend who struggled with fates casual normal mode. He enjoyed the game but isn't invested enough in the fe genre to "get good". Casual mode also allows you to play at your own pace. Some people like to play with casual mode and still reset/turnwheel for characters. They just like to be in control of the pace they play at. Personally i feel that casual mode should be locked to normal mode though.
I don't get why people are angry at the time controlling mechanic, I want more FE games, making the games more tedious to play is just going to turn away casual players. Yeah hardcore fans will still play the games but hardcore fans alone nearly caused the series to be cancelled all together. Penalizing players for turning back time is just going to make people drop the game and they probably won't pick up the next games and we'll end up in an FE cancelation territory again. Casual players are necessary for the survival of any series, without them there's just not enough money
Just beat Binding Blade recently and I have to agree, what happened to Ranked Mode? Its honestly kind of weird its not around anymore to check out our overall performance. I think if we had something like that in combination with a turnwheel mechanic it would probably fix things
I would love ranks and achievements. It could possibly give bonuses for new save files and maybe unlock special items or characters. Let casuals do their thing and reward the dedicated players.
They probably got rid of rankings because a lot of the requirements were weird or conflicting. For example, the funds rank encourages resource hoarding. You were punished for not picking up relics and for actually using good weapons. Then you have the combat rating that punishes you every time you enter combat and don't kill. That means that being unable to retaliate due to range and just tanking in general is punished. Feeding units kills is also punished. The exp rank is basically counter all of the other ranks. You have to sacrifice your turn counts, your funds, and your combat ratio to raise a bunch of other units that normally wouldn't see the light of day. They probably should have kept the tactic rank but that would force IS to actually playtest their games to figure out what is realistic and what isn't.
I think that a good way to balance the trunwheel would be to add additional ways to spend your points, such as using two or three to get a free crit, maybe spend 5 to give a unit another turn. This would provide tactical options to use proactively at the cost of your safety net. this way everyone would still have the assurance the turnwheel provides while giving experienced players who don't need it a new resource to manage ant use in their strategies.
I'm not sure on this mechanic. It's mostly because I get frustrated having to figure out, in advance, what is even happening, what position I want to even be in, and if it's even possible to do so. It's a lot to consider. Although I knew of Fire Emblem before awakening, Awakening is where it sort of clicked with me. But over time, I've noticed I'd rather take the easier route. All the planning I do, all the calculations I do in my head, it tends to just... Not happen and I either get unlucky, a situation I need to keep in mind more, or make a moronic decision that costs me a unit and basically a reset. In those situations, I'm happy the wheel is there. Though I ought to have used it more, I generally just do a reset. However, all these points take my more negative experiences with the series in mind. I do love to see the relationships grow. Getting even more powerful allies to do even more. Yet, due to the threat of losing a unit forever, should I move a unit into range of too many attacking enemies, I barely experiment or figure out how to deal with a highly threatening, since the risk tends to outweigh the reward to me. Even moreso when you consider a character in fates: Rinkah. No player, without outside help, for the first time, would know that she is really damn bad. Her growths are in completely useless areas and she barely gains stats. While we have the internet and such things can be looked up later, how am I supposed to know that a unit like her would suck HARD!? Another one is Hilda. In a playthrough I did, she basically became useless, because her stat growths themselves were appalling, I was highly unlucky on that front. And something like that is really frustrating when you hear of a playthrough where she is a beast. All this to say that fire emblem tends to leave me consistently frustrated. Outside of a normal playthrough on casual mode, without cheesing the hell out of the game with suicide attacks, feels like it suits me so much more. Because while I enjoy a hard game, it feels like fire emblem just wastes time. And that's the last thing I seek in a game.
The rewind has a lot of potential to be turned into an interesting mechanic beyond an undo button and keep it always available, like one or a combination of the following. -make the rewind a resource that instead of starting at a high number, starts at 0 and you have to build up during a chapter. -make it a skill with a conditional trigger. -make rewind cost availability of a specific unit. -make rewinding only available during enemy phase -make rewinding into enemy phase relevant by giving a small stat boost to the unit that died so they may survive combat in exchange of being weaker in some way or receiving less experience. -make it reduce unit experience -make rewinding something that you can "plant" on an unit or enemy unit during the chapter, that sets off like bomb that only affects a specific area once conditions have been met. -make it so you carry the results back in time through some condition. -be able to use more resources to unify different timelines, make an unit's action turn into another unit's action, etc, plus many others.
OR a more simpler and interesting solution would be to have the same mechanic as Sekiro has with it's resurrection system. You can choose whether you want or don't want to have the mechanic available to you (in sekiro, you have the option to gain an item to revive once more if you are killed in combat and continue for the rest of the game. You can also reject the item and for the rest of the game you cannot revive to continue) or add a consequence by using said system (in sekiro if you died to many times and revive to continue the battle and not die naturally and return to the mini shrine, important npc's will start getting sick and die because of you).
I feel like it's been 10 years or so since permadeath was even a relevant mechanic. I sometimes wish the game autosaved every action to prevent resetting or rewinding, but then I realize how not fun that would be most of the time. Maybe a system that rewards players for not resetting/rewinding? Casual mode was its own setting back in the day, but now it's just integrated into every difficulty. The scripted character deaths in modern games do not have the same weight as losing a tactically important unit that you've gotten to know over the course of a playthrough
Not being able to reset is called an iron man which is a challenge run some people do. If they forced that upon the player base i think sales would drop by 90%
This is probably the cleanest version of this entire concept/debate I've seen, and as always is great content, but I have two observations I'd like to make, and I sincerely hope you see this Ghast. One, you *do* bring up the "if you don't like it, don't use it" argument, but then dismiss it with a simple, at least I think this is what you're trying to say, 'but if it's there I'm gonna use it". This sounds to me like you are saying that because you, and I know there are others but keep in mind here you are saying that because *you* like challenge runs and more difficult content, that the option *should not exist* for players who don't agree, because it's uncomfortable for you to self-impose a challenge on yourself, the game has to provide *all* the challenge itself. I can get where you are coming from but challenge runs like Nuzlokes are popular for all *kinds* of game, forgive me but I just don't see why this argument is meant to be compelling. Secondly you bring up the beginning of another argument, when mentioning save features and save-scrumming, but I feel like you don't really deliver it home. The argument that players have been resetting when characters die long before the turnwheel, so much so that input codes were implemented in at the very least Awakening and Fates to accomplish just that. Holding the shoulder buttons, then pressing start, takes you *right* back to the title screen without so much as a load screen. The turnwheel is taking a behavior players of the series have been doing for a long time, and putting convince on it. Lastly, there's your statement that current games are "way too forgiving for sloppy play". Now, this is just my personal take but as someone who has been cutting her teeth on FE games since the Wii (not since the very beginning, I hope that doesn't invalidate my views) My mistakes have often lead to resets. The *only* times I keep a character death is with a long chapter, managing to pull through but only by losing someone, and not knowing if I could do it better another time. And yes, largely the turnwheel eliminates that. But what we gain, as a game mechanic, is saved time. *not* needing to chapter reset when we make *one* mistake, and I don't think learning what you did was wrong, immediately trying something else, is a worse way to learn than making a mistake, then having to *completely* reset the battle and do the whole thing again, and potentially forgetting what you did wrong only to repeat it. It feels less like the games are ignoring mistakes, and more that you might be assuming people today just aren't bothering to learn just because they are learning it differently, like how parents look down on their kids when new technology makes life easier. I really hope this doesn't come off as angry or hostile, I *love* your content even when I don't agree, and this is again the best video I've seen on the topic and I'm so glad it's out there and does show multiple sides to the problem. Have a great day and I hope you have a blast with Engage.
A huge deterrent to losing units in modern Fire Emblem is that they're (usually) good characters that can't be replaced by late-game units that likely have far less build-up. Nowadays, units are more than just assets or scripts of numbers, they're people that the audience are invested in. So here's a solution to that: have the game's story acknowledge fallen characters and do interesting stuff afterwards. For a few examples... If a character dies during a chapter, then the end-of-chapter cutscene changes in tone, giving a feeling of "we've won, but at what cost?" Perhaps extra character specific scenes could be tagged onto most chapters where someone mourns someone else's loss earlier in the fight. If a character is important or at least relevant in a later cutscene, have their absence be acknowledged by other characters, and in rare cases significantly change the scene altogether. In games like Three Houses with a home base, close friends or rivals of a fallen character won't be in their usual place during 'free time' on a given month but will instead be at the gravesite or their fallen comrade's room or some other place they liked, thinking about the recent loss. You could even have branching 'support conversations', where if a character dies at B rank, then instead of their usual A rank conversation, the surviving character has a scene all to themselves trying to come to terms with the death and make sense of the loose threads left untied. Perhaps normal conversations could change in tone depending on how many characters have or haven't died. Conversations can be consistently more optimistic and upbeat if all is going well, but shift to heavier topics or just be darker in tone if casualties pile up. TLDR: Fire Emblem stories often focus on the costs of war, and none is ever greater than the human cost, but the stories don't ever capitalise on that by acknowledging when player characters die outside of scripted events. Change that, and you have a permadeath system that appeals even to those of us who play for the story and characters first and foremost.
I think I’ll treat my first playthrough of Engage as an ironman and see how I feel about the necessity of the turnwheel after my first playthrough. I reckon if we get a Maddening setting it’s absolutely valid to use since it’s very unforgiving but the game needs this feature for the people who desire a chill/storyline experience
Honestly, I don't hate it, but I find it to be a bit...much, ya know? I kinda don't want it around, to be honest. That said, I begrudgingly concede that at LEAST when they implemented it in 3h, it was a game built around it. Better to have this mechanic built around the game, than for a game to have it slapped on. Now, as for the turnwheel itself, I think it deserves a place as a staple in future games if, and ONLY IF, it's made an optional part of your save file's difficulty setup, when it asks you which difficulty mode you wanna play on and if you prefer casual or classic mode. Have the turnwheel be an option too, and select yes or no, that way it does what those other options did, and lets more people be satisfied based on personal preference. Obviously, I would prefer that a game is not built around it either, and is instead focused on your strategic thinking and clever map design. But most of all, above any other aspect of fire emblem's gameplay? I yearn for them to go back to having large casts, while using their plentiful money to take time and effort into fleshing those cast members out, regardless of overall relevance. I like the idea of the games being based around losing SOME units over the course of the journey, and wish these games werent so scared to do so anymore. After Echoes (and even then it only got away because it was a remake and had to be faithful, though then again it was a unique specimen in the series to begin with) I think the series just...gave up on it, ya know?
3H relied *heavily* on Divine Pulse, to the point where even on Classic mode, you were playing Casual mode. People make the argument: “Don’t use it,” but the problem is that the game is *designed* around using it. Not using Divine Pulse is just not fun, because you either literally just can’t continue playing if you lose someone important, or the game becomes exponentially harder. On higher difficulties this is especially true, because units are way harder to replace, and player hit rates can range anywhere from 40%-80% at best. Ghast also didn’t mention that 3H has ways built into the map to artificially use Divine Pulse, like ambush spawns that have no indication to players and almost always result in 1 or 2 deaths. What I want, and am hoping for from Engage, is less reliance on the “turnwheel” mechanic. I want to be able to play the game without it. I’d prefer Ghast’s proposed option 2: where the game provides a steady stream of a variety of characters as the game progresses, with a few notable lategame powerhouses. This gives variety to the characters, and makes each individual strength more notable. I’d expect the chapter 12 30 year old mercenary to be naturally stronger than the recruit you got in chapter 2. And if you get everyone at the beginning of the game, they’d have to be the same strength; that wouldn’t be realistic or memorable. Anyone who’s played FE7 remembers how much of a badass Pent is, same with FE10 Zihark and FE Fates Ryoma. Those are the gold standards of recruitable pre-promoted characters, and it saddens me that we don’t see those anymore.
I feel it’s perfectly fine to have the turn wheel mechanic. The only thing I feel should be changed is have it scale based on difficulty. So higher difficulty and depending on if you’re playing classic and casual mode you have less uses. I feel it would be the best of both worlds. New players who would choose easier difficulty have many uses, while those that want a challenge this would add to that
Another easy solution would be to make the rewind mechanic be an optional mode, on top of the choice of Casual and Classic. This way the player gets to choose how they want to experience the game, and the game doesn't need to be balanced around the mechanic. They literally don't need to think too hard about it, and I think everyone would be happy. Those who like rewinds can play Classic mode with rewinds. Those who don't want rewinds can play without rewinds while also not affecting their game, as it would no longer be a resource the developers are expecting you to use. That's why I believe making it an optional mode would be the simplest solution.
The way I see it if the developer didn't want me to use a mechanic than they wouldn't have put it in the game or say something about the mechanic that would discourage me from using it.
Just add a toggle to turn it off, I am sorry but it all just comes down to self control in the end. For an example, pokemon has an affection system where if you play with your pokemon they will gain affection, when you max it out they will crit almost every time, survive multiple attacks at 1 hp and shrug off status. This makes the game very easy, but I as a player have to make a conscious decision to use it, as long as it is not automatically applied (like in the gen 4 remakes) I do not use it and it does not affect my gameplay. It is the same with rewinding or "save scumming" (which I never thought of to get around bad rng level ups thanks for the suggestion) the game doesnt take control and make you do it, it is almost a non issue. If the option to use it is too great, just burn all the uses at the beginning of a battle.
In the gen 4 remakes you could just heal with herbs. The herb shop is available before the second gym and well before affection starts to have an effect. Its mildly annoying but isn't that difficult to deal with.
An idea that I think could improve the turn wheel system is to add an additional point system called something like “Phoenix Points” where you start out with 3 (can upgrade to 5) and every time you use the turn wheel to revive someone, you must spend 1 Phoenix Point to do so. The big difference from regular turn wheel uses is that the total number of uses would only replenish by 1 (to a cap of 3 to 5) at the end of each story chapter or paralogue. This keeps the benefits of the turn wheel but creates possible long term consequences by over-relying on it. It also makes you think about cascading consequences by creating a scenario where multiple units die becomes way more problematic. It also makes you think about making reckless moves as you might want to conserve Phoenix Points for a later possibly harder map.
This might be problematic. The classic "i hit end turn by accident" becomes an automatic reset. It also makes a series of catastrophic rng an automatic reset.
i feel that the turnwheel is also an answer to the ever growing attachment fans feel over the characters since awakening, since it's that game where the support system has gotten way more in depth, and after three houses that feeling got magnafied, the cast from that game is phenomenal and it goes without saying the support system has gotten even better. People don't want to lose their favorite characters/pairings, period
One thing I like that 3 houses did is if you reverse time and do the same thing again it will always end the same way you can't just keep rerolling It was only designed to save your allies can't be use just because you're unhappy how an attack went For example you attack with a 99% chance still miss. Oh well I will just rewind time and just attack with that same unit again. It will still miss because you didn't try out new
I have for a long time been thinking there should be a slight insentive to play with less rewinds and here is what I thought of: Now rewinds are normally tied to a Goddess, be it Milla or Sothis, so why not tie a rewind to a Goddess of Fortune and Chance. Before every battle, you select how many rewinds you want to bring into battle and depending on the percentage, the enemy drops/chests will change. Example, boss drops a sword when you kill him;100-66% he will drop an iron sword, 66-33% he would drop a steel sword and 33% to 0% he drops an armorslayer, which will help in the next chapter. Not gonna give any for 0% so people can still bring atleast 1-2 so they don't break their game cause they got a 2% crit on a 53% hit during turn 20. The only issue I see with this is that it is a positive feedback loop, meaning that if you don't bring the rewinds, then you have better equipment/stat boosters so you are less insentivised to bring rewinds in latter chapters, and if you DO bring any, they you don't have the better gear/stats so you will be relying on rewinds to save you more often.
i get they added it to stop perma-death, to help newer players into the series, but i feel like that's what Casual mode is for anyway. Casual stops any units from being lost forever, so the turnwheel ends up being pointless. well, not entirely, since the unit is still lost until the next chapter so won't gain exp until then. it's hard to say what the best play for them to do is, as different people have different ideas of what works.
Turn Wheel/ Rewind Mechanic just needs to go entirely. We have Phoenix Mode for fuck's sake... If people don't want to care about battles, fine, I can live with that, but don't open Pandora's Box for those of us who actually take the time to get good at tactics. Nothing is more of a bastardization to a tactical game than trivializing the battles within it. If y'all want Fire Emblem to be a visual novel, you can literally just petition that as a spin-off game title or get an anime made.
I think another way to balance out the rewind mechanic would be to let players use the resources for other things than a rewind. For instance granting players protection from ambushes for a turn. My idea is to allow you to burn a resource for the time mechanic before the ambush is triggered. Once the enemies show they would be hit with an effect that prevents them from acting until the wnd of their following turn. This would give players an option to either ambush the enemy or at least get units out of danger. This could also be used alongside rewind but would naturally consume double the resource.
I like the turn wheel. I don't use it very much, but I am glad it's there because it respects my time. I think it has too many uses, but at the same time I've never used it more than once on a map and there are many maps where I don't use it at all, even on Hard. I'm sure I would use it on Maddening more though, but I don't like ambush spawns so the mode doesn't interest me. It's why I don't play Awakening on hard mode. Having Lissa dying to a flyer ambush spawn is just too frustrating and I wish the turn wheel was there in Awakening. I think a better question to ask though is, Why is casual mode still there? With the turn wheel, I don't see why casual mode needs to exist. Do players really need both casual and the turn wheel? I think there should be an option to turn the turn wheel off. I would never turn it off - I don't want to waste my time replaying 90% of a map - but I can understand why people do and why they might want an achievement or something for beating the game without it.
Rewards player playing carefully. It's like playing a chess tournament and when you lose a piece you can call time out and ask the the ref to revive a piece whenever you want.
@@SyLuX636 Okay. As an option though. Don't want to be the guy in a chess tournament calling time? Then don't. It's so simple yet so many people cry about it.
@@nannersnanners9841 ah the old easy argument of if you don't like it don't use it. the problem is that the game forces you to use it either way if you lose an easy game like 3H somehow.
@@SyLuX636 Ah, yes, the old easy argument... which is objectively correct. The game only "forces" you to use the divine pulse if The lord or Byleth die-- at which point you'd have to reset anyway from the gameover screen. It's so easy to not use the Divine pulse at all but you just need something to cry about.
@@SyLuX636 Man, I sure hate how Fire Emblem games allow you to go into the settings and turn up the text speed. Sure, I could just not change the speed of the text, but that's not good enough. I motion for Intelligent Systems to remove this setting from not just my game, but everyones game because that's how I want it.
Maybe what we can do in the new game is you get something like time shards Wich you could use to get bonus exp or rare items. Which you obtain from leftover rewinds
Never had an issue with the Turnwheel. It really is just a tool used to circumvent bad RNG for me. Though, it feels redundant to have it alongside casual mode since permanent death isn't a factor there.
Think I have a very interesting concept for this I'd just hope for unique enemy units which I would call chrono mages. These will be massive targets as there one gimmick is preventing using the turn rewinding. I loved the retreat chapter in engage where you lose the time wheel temporarily any unit that dies while you aren't in possession of it is gone for real. Making a unit responsible for preventing the ability to turn back time has so much potential. They are super high value targets for your army which helps with map design. You can sink a ton of resources to go fight the chrono mage on the left side of the map but then you might not have enough time to go and loot the chests on the other side of the map. At the same time you can completely ignore the chrono mage and rush the chest giving you plenty of time to get the loot but now your troops are facing a risky perma death. If the time crystal is going to be a key feature in Fire Emblem then the enemies should also be able to effect it there is so many new dynamic map designs and stratagies that could be added into the game by just adding the chrono mages. They can also be balanced in lots of different ways they might be a unit that is just like the martial monk making them fairly weak on their own where the enemy defends them with a small squad. Or they could have multiple health bars like the minibosses in engage. Either way more maps should play with the idea of limiting the ability to turn back time. They necessarily don't even have to be a unit maybe a large crystal the enemy is defending and if shattered bam you have the ability to turn back time. If the enemy had an active way to stop our use of divine pulse or the dragon crystal I'd argue that in times where we have beaten the side objective of either smashing the crystal or defeating the chrono mage we should have unlimited charges. Its just so much more interesting having certain sections where you have to really play carefully or face consequences than as it currently is as a mechanic that is just always active and makes you relatively safe from anything. But I'd love seeing early maps be the classic ones we have now and somewhere through the story the enemy realizes we are altering time to are favor and makes a countermeasure to stop us. This would make for a great difficulty curve with narrative impact on the story. early maps are easy letting new players get use to the series and understand divine pulse but later in the gameplay the enemies make it harder limiting your divine pulse at various stages of the map. maybe you are on a sneak attack and hit the enemies by surprise and once you initiate the first combat or the enemy patrol's sees you. the enemy realizes and sends out a scout that will turn on a machine to remove divine pulse from the rest of the map in x turns. This could make for an interesting steal idea where you sneak in with a small squad designed to get to the machine first and prevent it from turning on either sabotaging it or just defending it so the enemies can never get to it. Then you can send in your main army through the front gate without worrying. Just hundreds of fun ideas can come from the idea of yeah we keep to idea of being able to roll back mistakes BUT we allow the enemies to affect it and incorporate that into the map design. I also like the idea of mixing this with the Valkyrie staff as yeah some people no matter what will reset the chapter if a unit dies at all so having the valk staff as a backup for the hard sections where your resources are most limited would be really good. Hell maybe you will start a run with a risky Strat to get the map loot before the thieves. This leaves one of your units dead. Then you slowly push the secondary objectives before pushing the final boss. Reclaim your ability to turn back time go over to their corpse and revive them for the final engagement. might make things really easy defiantly make the valk staff rare and super limited uses but allowing for the most strategies is the most important thing in a game like fire emblem..
In 3 houses specifically since the time pulse was linked to Byleth and randomly was shown to have heart pain in some pains wouldn't it have been cool for there to have been some kind of cost or debuff for over use inflicted onto Byleth
Excellent points! I really do think that the Turnwheel is overpowered if someone wants to improve at FE instead of just beating the game. Resetting a chapter for a unit is already not the "intended" way to play for more than half of the franchise, but I always found it to be a suitable punishment, because you're allowed to remake strategies at the cost of possibly a ton of time and good levels lost. It is a choice with very weighted sides, a choice which most games reward you after gritting your teeth and pushing through the loss. I'll never forget "ironman-ing" FE 3 Book 1, because my cartridge couldn't save, and losing Caeda right at retaking Alteia/Aritia. I just needed to go forward. This happened about 6 years ago, too. However, looking at it as a QoL, it is fantastic for more casual players that want to beat the game, but I'd have at least presented an option to not use it during a campaign, seeing as it can feel really tempting to use for those who don't want it.
The Shadow Dragon mid chapter saves are the best system for me, and I will keep pushing for it. There are ways to design a map that is challenging, but not BS with unpredictable ambushes that necessitate turn by turn resets. One or two mid chapter saves should be enough. I think it would be best as a mode besides difficulty that you select at the beginning of the game. Then maps could be designed assuming someone is using mid chapter saves as opposed to the turnwheel.
To me, I really think the reason for the turn wheel reflects how the FE developer's philosophy of their games has shifted with the resurgence of the franchise. Older games obviously threw tons of characters at you expecting them to die with more characters to replace them. But recently, I think they've realized how integral the characters themselves are to the fan base, and now expect a decent majority of them to want to keep everyone alive. The persistence of the turn wheel is now more so for the sake of convenience for people to keep their units alive without the hassle of a full reset. However, I do think it needs to be balanced in a way to help players still think about their strategy instead of falling back to turn wheel to an action that was likely gonna fail if they thought about it a little longer I kinda like your idea of a ranked mode, essentially letting you rewind the timeliness, but the game will still remember that death and incorporate it into the score. My personal idea is to make the turnwheel something that has to be charged up throughout each map and earn uses of. As for how its charged not too sure, maybe after every 5 turns you get one use, or instead builds up with each action done (attack, rally, dance, heal, reposition, movement, etc...) And each use is limited to a certain number of turns you can rewind, so one use = up to 3 turns rewind. But you can build up more uses in order to rewind further (ex: 1 = 1-3 turns, 2 = 4 turns, 3 = 5 turns). Furthermore, maybe the turn wheel is something that can be upgraded with a skill tree to fit your play style. One can upgrade to increase the maximum # of uses you can build up. Or you can instead make it so the turn wheelbuilds up faster. Maybe even upgrade it so each use can go back more turns than normal. While I think the action that will trigger the time wheel being charged could use work. I think this is a good idea to make the turn wheel a resource to strategize around. While I think maybe having turn wheel build up passively based on turns can easily be cheese by end turning a ton to build it up, I think it will ultimately depend on the game itself. Is it the type of game with objectives or rout the enemy, or do so and so within 10 turns. Games of the former can easily break thr system, but games of the latter make the turn wheel more as a limited resource. Of course the turn wheel may also vary on difficulty, like normal mode makes it so you start every map with 3 uses already, a opposed to hard having none needing charge.
I think save points are better and work as whole because unlike the turnwheel, you choose one point in time you can go back to. Sure you can save every turn, but if you saved at a spot where you will inevitably lose a unit 1-2 turns down the line, you can't just load an earlier save state, making it more balanced imo.
On my first playthrough, I completed Echoes without the turnwheel, but I I sometimes feel I might as well not have done so, because there is no trace left that I did... other than my own vague memory of it. It would be nice if there was a icon or perhaps a counter in the game, so I can prove to myself that I did it. I think it's fun to look back on past achievements. Moreover, I don't think I would have ever attempted, let alone completed, a fresh file maddening mode run if not for the memento you get at the end.
Idea: what if instead of having a turn wheel, Alear has a unique action he/she can take where they put down a “beacon” and rewind the time to the point they put it down? I’m thinking 2 min, maybe 5 max uses, can only have one down at a time, and doesn’t activate automatically on Alear’s death in combat, meaning that the player still has to reset if they lose Alear, like with a lot of the other Lords/Avatars. Just a thought, would love to here some feedback.
This sounds like a pretty good alternative to me. Like save points with a bit more player control. I think part of turnwheel's raw potential was being able to select precisely what actions were undone. With this, you can't just press the turnwheel button to undo a mistake if you completely ignored something dangerous. The player has to actively predict their strategy going wrong and put down a "save point", which might go unused but also might not. Hopefully a game that has this mechanic would also forgo terrible design decisions like completely unwarned ambush reinforcements. So long as the player is paying attention and thinking about what will happen, then I think they can be rewarded for it with a few retries.
In my opinion I think the turn wheel system should be taken out of the series or if it has to remain, add the ability for units to die in casual mode, but allow the use of a turn wheel. This way you still can have the turn wheel but still have thr option of perma death in both modes
I think the problem with just removing the turnwheel is that the mechanic was introduced in the first place to patch over an issue that Fire Emblem has always had: The way it handles perma-death in the first place. Resetting a chapter is boring. The turnwheel is also boring, but a lot more convenient. I honestly think that if the turnwheel is removed, we've still got an underlying issue: How do we make the player continue to play the game even AFTER losing a unit? I think there are all sorts of things FE could do to make death more interesting. Another comment on this video addressed maybe having units grieve for their fallen comrades. If a unit dies, those close to them would get unique dialogue mourning them, and on the gameplay side the game could permanently alter a grieving unit's stats and/or abilities, so that you can basically get characters that are unique to your playthrough based on who died.
Am I the only one who thinks having the threat of losing your characters-ones you've level-grinded and cared for-is one of the magical pillars of the franchise? It's always felt a little cheap now that you can just 'oopsies'. The risk is what made the characters so much more real to me.
To be honest, I think having a couple rewinds are pretty great. I have lost so many hours and nearly perfect runs to crappy RNG. Having rewinds doesn't change how I approach anything, it just saves me from restarting an entire level due to dice rolls, or missing the one thing that I overlooked.
I personally want this mechanic to always be present in some way. I NEED some way to avoid the SOUL CRUSHING need to reset the entire map….cuz, call me crazy, but even though I play on classic every time, I am NEVER allowing a single unit of mine to die. I just will not allow it.
Echoes had the opportunity to introduce a penalty for Turnwheel by requiring sacrifices to Mila. You already do it for fatigue, so it wouldn't be a stretch to need to sacrifice high quality food to give you a glimpse of the future (which is canonically how Mila's Turnwheel works, contrasting with Three Houses and Engage mechanics.
I've played every single FE game multiple times each from fe1 on snes forward. The way I have always played through included not letting anyone die, ever, not anything to do with losing exp commitment for that character. Time crystal has been a godsend for helping save me time resetting the full stage when I inevitably miss 4 90+% attacks in a row and then the surviving unit kills one of mine with a 2% crit. Could have less charges than it does now, but I absolutely do not want to see it go away.
I dont really have a problem with the wheel mechanics. It is not hard to ignore if you dont like it (I find that "its not in the spirit of the game" arguement stupid.) If i had to change something just make the turn amount difficulty dependant and or give the option to disable it.
I preferred how Echoes used the system compared to 3H. In echoes you didn't get nearly as many uses and it also had the handicap that you couldn't use it if alm or celica died. So maybe something more like that might be a way to better balance it or maybe make it like 3 at max and it uses more the longer back you need to go? I think 3H had the problem of ironically being designed with the system in mind. It expects you to yolo your units onto the frontlines all the time and without anything really holding you back from doing it + the very basic map design, it gets very easy to abuse and becomes a hard crutch. Especially when as stated in 3H, you really don't want to loose units with how much time the game expects you to put in with them. I think the system can work. I do think some kind of reward each chapter without using X amount of turnbacks or no turnbacks might help incentive better planning on using it with the system above of only 3 smaller wheels, I could see something like that being attempted in the future.
So fe echoes give you 12 turnwheel use while fe3h maddening give you 10 uses and both start with 3. The main difference is that the echoes turnwheel increase is more spread out and are easier to miss
One thing I like doing to reduce my number of get out of jail free cards is using Divine Pulse for random stuff like if I immediately notice I've placed a unit suboptimally, or a equipped a steel sword instead of iron, then I'll use a Divine Pulse instead of just going with it. Sometimes I'll just divine Pulse back to Turn 1 if something cursed happened like 30% hit 1% crit, instead of resetting.
Frankly I like the turn wheel mechanic FAR better than casual mode as a way to make an easy mode. I think it helps people get better at a strategy game and helps you out if you misclick screwing your over. In my eyes it helps with learning strategy since you make a move and it doesn’t work you can see that it doesn’t and then can try something else. Given the fact that it is limited (and i think this is how you’d balance it) you can still have the risk of permadeath
Interesting reasoning (not sarcastic, I mean it genuinely.), I'm actually the exact opposite. I love casual mode and have despised every iteration of Divine Pulse. It's not because I'm unskilled at strategy games (came from other strategy games to FE), it's because I enjoy the strategies employed more in casual than I do in classic. I can beat classic with no problems and minimal rewind uses, but that's not Fun for me. Divine Pulse doesn't make it feel better for me as a "git gud" because I already Am good at strategy games, I just don't like that style of play that accompanies classic. (Example, I 100% enjoy plans like in a maddening casual type situation of "Move character B up, reliably proc Luna. Plan on character getting hit and taken out, opening the position to move character A up into position to absorb the next round" and so forth more than anything I did in TH or Echoes. Those plans were significantly more fun for me than Divine Pulse ever was, because I like playing each map like chess. Classic's strategies just aren't as fun for me specifically.) For me the best comparison to a FE map using Divine Pulse is to roguelites' assist modes, if that makes sense. For those who don't play them, roguelites usually have where you try to play through essentially the "whole game" in one run, and at defeat, return you all the way to the start. However, some of these games will have modes that let you restart at the current room/level/etc instead of the beginning. And what I've noticed here when I use those modes on occasion, is that I get significantly more frustrated being trapped on the same level, than I do with most full run defeats. More time spent on an area that is frustrating, banging into different options with no success, maybe even getting sloppy or careless, traps you in a series of frustrating replays until you get out of that area, or stop using the mode, at least for me, and that's a similar feeling I get to Divine Pulse. So yeah, it is super useful, and can save a run, but for some people, like me, it's just not Fun, whereas Casual mode is because it plays more to a "chess game but each map has all your pieces available at the start but can be removed from play for strats/sacrifices, or gambits" type strategizing form. What I'd wish for in a future game is balancing where turn-rewinds aren't necessary, with different modes available for everyone's different favored playstyle, instead of the reliance of turnwheel's existence to patch it up. (As others have stated, I also dislike the impact is has on the plot, or the implications of them, as if it's going to exist, I wish it was utilized more in the story, and so forth. Make it make sense and be something the characters know of and react to, if the game is going to lean on its existence.) Thank you for offering your thoughts though! It was interesting to see why some people enjoy it more, and helps me accept its use and existence because even if it's not enjoyable to me, it might be to others. ^^ Sorry for the lengthy comment everyone!
One thing I wish more people would acknowledge (though they don't out of good faith, bless them) is that the Turnwheel mechanic more likely than not came about almost solely due to Intsys being well aware that most people who played Gaiden did not play it on original hardware, but played on emulator, which have savestates. Savestates are much closer to the Turnwheel, and it likely exists as the answer to savestates on consoles, which typically do not have them like PCs do. Knowing their fanbase was very used to emulating their old as balls Famicon games, they just bit the bullet and put it in, then kept it likely as a way to entice people to play on console over pirating their games through emulation, given how gung-ho their partner Nintendo is about emulating. The Turnwheel problem more just comes about from a community that got very comfortable with savestates just existing, due to emulation being the only way for non-Japanese fans, or fans not born in the 1980s, to be able to experience half of the entire franchise.
Players should be rewarded for not using rewinding. A game should always reward skill. Something very valuable but not one of a kind. In three houses, it should have been rare materials to forge those rusted weapons and repair relics/the scythe. The game rewards you with the ability to use stronger weapons with the trade off that you don't rewind. It was always a pain to use combat arts with relics since they eat up so many uses. Rewarding stat items would also be good. In future FE games, it could be bonus EXP. (Looking at you tellius remake.) Or maybe exclusive cosmetics. I don't think the answer is to limit these new quality of life mechanics but instead give very nice incentives to not use it. Want all the extra loot? Get good.
I feel the turnwheel has actively made me a better player. By being able to go back immediately and figure out what I could have done differently, I learn. By resetting after a death, I learn nothing in particular because I cannot try again - the scenario no longer exists because the map will not go the same after I reset. I liked Casual Mode in Awakening and Fates, but acknowledge its not a good teaching tool in any capacity. At the end of the day though, I'm never going to do a challenge run or do things that actively make my experience harder. I don't have the time to invest or the patience to be frustrated by things that should be bringing me joy.
An idea I had for reworking the turnwheel would be to make the uses a limited resource that the player obtains over the course of the game. For example completing a chapter would award a use of the turnwheel which could be used in a future chapter, uses could be stockpiled for a difficult chapter or for assurance in case of bad rng. This would add an extra layer of strategy while keeping permadeath as a valid option should the player wish to save their turnwheel uses.
13:40 I don't like the "add more units" solution. More units is bound to mean less well developed characters, aswell as support bloat and driving up development costs (more assets, more voice actors, etc.). A smaller cast of deeper characters is way better than many, bound to be less interesting, characters and 20 extra cooking/fishing/training supports.
kinda weird timing for a new video on NYE. But hey! I am here. first video back since I moved. Hope you enjoy and appreciate my thoughts! thanks for watching :)
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Just don't use it, people keep trying to push a narrative of the game being "not punishing enough". Everyone should play how they want within the confines of the game and you shouldn't complain about changing the quality of life mechanic to make it less worth reaching for lmao.
It's funny because my favorite thing about the turn wheel mechanic is misclicks.
I got me some bad butterfingers, and I've lost count of how many times of lost units because of them.
I find the turn wheel to be more of a “Hey, now I don’t have to fully reset the game” and found it helpful for me to learn and develop my own strategies in a faster manner. I also enjoy just being able to experiment without necessarily having to fully reset. I do think they should have a menu option to let people turn it off completely and just game over if a key character dies, for those players who want it off entirely, but I appreciate that it exists as a mechanic and wouldn’t wanna lose it entirely either.
The best answer would be to actively reward the player for completing maps without using too many rewinds. But, the harder the map, the more leeway you get with how many rewinds you can use before you lose the reward.
Add an option to auto reset when any character dies as well.
Because frankly, that's the way the game SHOULD be played
@@paperluigi6132 I don’t think they are going to do that or at least not anymore. The best option is to have a choice to turn it on or off. That way people on both sides can be happy.
@@1stCallipostle Don't play the game at this point
@@1stCallipostle I mean, I'm not sure this statement is so accurate because theoretically, the way its meant to be played is that dead people stay dead. We're just all refusing to allow our friends/pawns to die.
Here's an idea: how about rewarding the player for their unused charges? That way you can use it to protect your invested characters but are less tempted to use them on inconsequential flubs. The reward could be something simple like bonus gold or exp, or it could be something like points you can spend at a special shop or material necessary to repair rare weapons.
God I wish we had bonus exp
I wish BEXP would return. Especially with how they're pushing the sandbox aspect in the latest games. Having an incentive to keep rewind uses is an excellent idea.
Goddamn, I love this idea. It would be a cool solution, because plenty of people could continue using the turnwheel as a QOL feature, but there would always be that voice in the back of your head: "what if I challenged myself to make it through without it"
Your solution is so much better than Faergast's ideas.
@@harmonicarchipelgo9351 agreed 100%
Even in older fire emblems I use to just restart the whole mission over because I become attached to characters. The turn wheel really just eliminates the requirement of restarting the whole mission over so it kind of respects my time in that aspect. However I don't think people inherently drop the strategic side of the game because I know when I do mess up and have to rewind I then kick into overdrive and make sure that doesn't happen again.
Pretty much any time you go back more than one turn, that emphasizes even more that you have to plan out something different.
The problem is that harder difficulty modes in 3H were balanced AROUND the turnwheel.
This was kinda what I was thinking too. People have always been resetting maps in their Fire Emblem playthroughs, but now that resetting is introduced mechanically those same people find it offensive for some reason. I don’t get it.
@@auraguard0212 Is that really true because I remember having to reset so many times playing Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn. It feels like the whole series is based around resetting, even Fire Emblem Heroes.
Rewinds just make it less tedious, but people could still reset if they wanted.
You can just play casual mode if you’re going to worry about losing characters though, I don’t see why you would need both
Frankly, losing a character was never an option to me. I've reset a mission over 30 times once until I managed to clear it without deaths.
*It's not about "losing an unit you've invested in". It's about losing a character in a RPG.* I will go to any length to avoid that.
The Rewind mechanic is just what I've been doing since my first game, Sacred Stones, but faster.
In short, I just wanted to say that "more characters" is no solution. Whether there are 20 characters or a whole 100 makes no difference if you're playing for everyone to survive.
^
The culture of FE is so much more different than these sorts of videos realise. The vast majority of the player base doesn't care for things like rankings, or honesty or whatever. Especially as the series has gone on, more and more people refuse to accept friendly unit deaths.
@@fillerpoint555 The for lack of better terms "Get good" Side of the FE community really forgets how people play the games. Like in all the rewind conversation no one brings up that the majority of the players of FE before this point reset on any unit death, even characters they didn't particularly like.
In the older games you couldn’t reset turns just chapters. The punishment for losing a character was restarting the chapter or moving on without the character. That was fire emblem at its core. Being able to rewind to specific turns takes that away in my opinion.
@@StrategyMaster17 that’s not a good punishment tho. Find another way to disincentivize players from spamming the turn wheel, but making me go through pointless loading screens and repeat stage dialogue is infuriating. It doesn’t make me want to get better at the level, it makes me exponentially lose interest with each mistake as the game wastes my already limited time I can spend playing games.
@@StrategyMaster17 as someone who has played every game in the series, for many players who like keeping every character alive at all costs, a harder punishment will not fix things. In my first run of awakening(which was my first game in the series) I played it blind and let a few characters die but by the time fates came out and I had already played the gba games, I was already resetting on deaths. Truthfully, it’s a bad habit but I enjoy having turnwheel to save time on these things but I feel like reducing turnwheel uses is a good method for creating strategic difficult while also having a chance to keep everyone alive
I think the biggest issue people miss about the decision to reset vs let a unit die is that many players aren’t looking for what is “viable” to do. Sure it may be worth it but many people drawn to the series after awakening and especially 3 Houses find the main draw of fire emblem as the characters, even above gameplay. Letting their favorites die is a complete non option that wouldn’t be fixed with more late game units. I think the ranking system and save/turn wheel points on the map are probably the best solution to this. I’d also love to see the turn wheel toggleable when you start the game.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The series' focus on character storytelling, S rank supports, and sheer volume of support conversations show where Intelligent Systems is placing their games' value. In the earlier titles, many units didn't really have personalities. There were no support conversations and you were getting practically 2-5 recruits every other map. They built those games to have named units die, even though those named units were really just generic soldiers with anime hair. But fandom does what fandom does and started picking apart and celebrating recruitable units. Everyone has a favorite character, everyone has a favorite support and battle quote, etc. The series has never been more popular than it is today and IS knows why.
I've never been invested in the permadeath system, only ever feeling regret from lost units of the past. They aren't a resource for me to throw away when necessary. Honestly, I think the best version of permadeath I've seen is from the new XCOM games. Your units have names and unique designs and battle quotes and you invest time into them. Every death still hurts and you want to make better choices in the future to prevent losing more of your favorites. But the XCOM soldiers aren't really comparable to all the handcrafted backstories and personalities of Fire Emblem rosters.
Every FE unit feels like a piece of the greater whole, much more comparable to BioWare companions than generic soldiers in an RTS. IS kinda wants to have their cake and eat it too so we get these systems like mid-battle saves and time-rewind, classic versus casual mode, so people drawn to the permadeath mechanic can enjoy it as much as those using FE as an interactive television show. How well they meet that middle, I guess that's up to the individual.
Agree. Plus if a character is more memorable, they will probably sell well in FEH 😅
Old School Fire Emblem fans don't like letting units die too though. People have been resetting instead of letting units die since forever.
One of the core features that made FE unique amongst other SRPG's was permadeath. No one WANTS their favourite characters to die cause of a mistake they made, instead it's adds another layer of strategic depth to gameplay, where the player ensures they reach an outcome where everyone can live.
It's one of the many reasons FE become the most popular and probably longest running SRPG franchise. With Engage being a game that "celebrates" the franchises history, I would've been neat to have a more traditional experience by just making the turnwheel an option you can turn off especially if you choose the classic difficulty in the first place.
@@Pik3rob but resetting completely has actual consequences versus going back a couple of turns. It still encourages you to play smart
Just from a psychological standpoint it would be better to reward the player for not using the turnwheel, rather than punish them for using it.
Personally giving the player bonus XP or money depending on how many turnwheel uses they have leftover is going to be more effective at mitigating over-reliance on it. As opposed to a positive punishment approach as you're suggesting, where you give a player a low rank to discourage them from using the turnwheel.
I'll be honest when losing a character I've never once thought about my investment into there stats or the time training them. It's always about losing the character and that's something I'm not gonna let happen because there is zero incentive to let that happen. It could be my least favorite character on an incredibly tedious map and I'm still gonna restart. Divine Pulse just saves time.
Gotta be honest, as someone who enjoys playing FE blind on the hardest modes, I really enjoy the divine pulse systems. Being able to play through the game without knowing about ambush spawns and the like ahead of time makes you hold on tight to those charges and makes you think about every rewind charge critical. I massively prefer it to the infinite resets that occurred during my Awakening Lunatic + runs, for instance. I can see how this system could make permadeath less of a thing on lower difficulty runs, but with the lengths of the maps in 3 houses, I definitely prefer lower instances of permadeath to 50 minute + map resets.
Anyways loving the videos ad always Ghast, Happy New Year!
My counter to that would be that intelligent systems should just design less BS moments like that. My problem with the turn wheel is that I feel like it influences the design of the levels because they know the player has a safety net.
@@TheNerdyGinger I totally agree that it overly influences their design, but for me at least I like the idea of SOME of the BS elements being included.
It adds to the immersion of the maps and the campaign for me. Enemies setting REAL, merciless ambushes is very thematic for the kind of war stories that FE generally tells. In the case of 3 houses in particular, it felt very thematic that the person most capable of single handedly turning the tide of the war was the person who can slightly manipulate time.
I don't necessarily think IS has ever hit the sweet spot of balancing the turn wheel systems in a way that feels completely satisfying, but I do think there are alot of positives that could POTENTIALLY come from a system like it.
Maybe if it's importance and power was more reined in than we have seen it in the past it could provide a satisfyingly new layer to the series' strategy, but so far it has seemed very all or nothing.
The best intro of the turn base game is Xcom enemy unknown. Literally watch your team die. Turn your heart into stone and use your units like resources.
@@raychii7361 that's not true, in fact you get attached to your units as they level up and become better assets, and considering that you can customize the looks of them is another plus to that.
If you really want a tactical game where your units have no value above strategic convenience and ease of use, then that's Famicom/advance wars.
@@carlostejeda4341 Yeah yeah. But they are still resources. I'm sure you wouldn't think twice sacrificing a weaker unit to save your investment. The tutorial of XCOM kill your squad to make it clear how unforgiving the game is.
I think a way to fix the rewind safety net is to reduce the uses depending on difficulty. Normal can have the normal 9 or so uses, Easy can have unlimited because why not, Hard can have maybe 3 or 4 and then your Maddening equivalent can either have 1 use or no uses all together. If the player is up for the challenge of harder difficulty, reduce how many times they can use the safety net. But that’s just my two cents.
I agree, whenever someone says “reduce the amount” they say it for all difficulty which wouldn’t help the newer players, and you need to have newer players come into the franchise to keep it going. So have it scale bc I doubt new players would choose maddening mode from the get go anyway
But reducing the uses doesn't really fix the problem created by divine pulse, it just reduces the severity. I personally want to play a game without it, but in your proposed solution, I'm only allowed to do that if I play on the hardest difficulty. I don't always like playing the same difficulty though. Conquest is the game I come back to most often and I don't always pick Lunatic. I do sometimes, but I play on Hard often as well, and I enjoy them both and it's a part of the game's replayability. Instead of doing it based on difficulty, it should just be it's own separate option. When the game starts and asks you what difficulty you want to choose and between casual and classic. Ask a third question about divine pulse, Infinite, normal, or none. (You can add "Reduced" as an option as well if you want but that might be too many choices with too little distinction and cause choice paralysis.) You can always change your option later in the difficulty settings too.
I strongly disagree. I enjoy games that are extremely difficult, but not punishing, meaning a mistake causes a loss, but a loss only going back a short bit. Playing on easier difficulties is boring because your units will just slaughter all enemies with no thought needed. Playing without turnwheel is just annoying because one small mistake means replaying an hour long map.
The complaints about turnwheel are silly. Either 'I don't like turnwheel and I am incapable of just not using it, so nobody should have it', or 'I play the game this way and everybody else should have to play the same way'.
@@jamesjett8050 I'm kinda new and found that a divine pulses will only help so much if you got a bad team and match ups
@@jamesjett8050 Luck is an integral aspect of the game and turnwheel completely minimizes that. Using risky poorly thought out strategies and then using turnwheel as a crutch for when they go wrong absolutely makes the game a lot easier overall.
I like the rewind stuff because I dont have the time or patience to care about arbitrary rankings and I like having the option of seeing the multiple unique dialogue exchanges from the related characters meeting in battle in a much more accessible way. Also I kind of become detached from the games whenever I lose a character. FE4 and FE6 was a miserable playthrough for me but I grew attached to the Tellius cast because I tried my damnest to keep everyone alive, and seeing them in both games feels nice
It really is a convenient feature for people who value the characters & story.
Like, Fire Emblem is a Social Sim now. I don't want the characters I spent dozens of hours talking to and appreciating just disappearing because I made an oops in combat or being so worthless that they have 3 clones available throughout the game.
Like, either call the series something new or let the people who just want a TRPG go find an indie project that keeps permadeath and intense challenge the focus.
I agree. I think a lot of hardcore veterans forget that everyone doesn’t think like them and that there’s people who play Fire Emblem for the story and characters, not to receive extreme challenges. I think everyone should enjoy the game for the aspects of it that they love the most. If someone likes Fire Emblem for the tactical challenge and brutal difficulties, they can still have that by ramping up their difficulty and neglecting to use the turn wheel. But if someone is a casual player and just wants to enjoy the game without a huge hassle, then they have the option available to play things safer so their own experience isn’t bogged down by difficulty. It’s a win for both sides, so I really don’t understand why people get so angry over the system itself.
Then just play casual mode on easy settings.
@@powpowouchy5 You can still lose battles on casual easy. Rewinding isn’t used solely for saving characters from death, it’s to help you correct other mistakes, too.
@@Curlorly06 dude, it is nearly impossible to lose on casual easy. In fact, you’re more likely to completely lose on classic/hard with the turnwheel than casual easy without it. “It’s to help you correct other mistakes too”. So you basically want a game where you have absolutely no accountability or consequences for your actions? Sure ok. Just make that another optional mode for people who don’t like the strategy aspect of the strategy game.
I think a good way to try and balance the turnwheel is instead of starting with all of the uses at the start of the map, instead earn them by making progress through the map. This way it works kind of like the save points in the DS games where you have to get to certain points to be able to use it.
This idea seems interesting, like having a few uses at the beginning and every X amount of turns that pass gain Y amount of uses. Or complete an objective/play according to the map's design, like "we should warn the villages" (while the win condition is to rout the enemy, though that might make bonus objectives more of a necessity) and for every village visited you gain Y amount of uses.
@@bubbles784 I could get behind the idea of having a few starting uses (I'm leaning towards 3) and earning more through the completion of side objectives. I fondly remember Radiant Dawn's use of side objectives that rewarded extra Bexp, though it could've been way better explained at the time.
@@brawlfan9999 Nah I think it should be only 2 at start MAX if they did it like this, because the start of maps are generally the easiest and wont really force you to use them up very early, you could just horde them and get more for the harder parts of the map. I also feel like if they did something like this they should reduce the amount you have depending on difficulity, hardest difficulty giving you 1 rewind at start and only 1 or 2 to earn through the rest of the map, while lower difficulties have more to be more forgiving and for newer players who will probably stick to those for quite a while.
Idk having 3 at start and able to get more than that? It would be just as broken as it is in 3H except arguably even more because Emblems exist. 3 at start on Easy/Normal, sure, but on Lunatic/Maddening? Nah that's just too much for a mode that's supposed to be a challenge.
@@chadachi3970 Right, I hadn't considered how absolutely broken the Emblems already are, let alone with rewinding on the menu
@@brawlfan9999 Urgh, don't even get me started on the Emblems.
Pretty much my sentiment: Turnwheel was good on Echoes because small team + bad hit rates and tight stat benchmarks often times doesn't give players the option to make up for bad RNG. No staffs, only one healer, no canto etc.
The inherent problem is the design of modern Fire Emblem:
Whereas the games were balanced around you losing units in the past, they are now designed to specifically invest into units that become irreplaceable. A big part of the strategy aspect is the long term thinking on where to bring those units that the progress of the game hinges on.
As an example, Thracia 776 also encouraged long term planning but more by limiting resources. 'Do you want to remove the sleep status now or would you save the use for later? Do you want to take this unit along and have them be fatigued next chapter?' while also providing limited supplies of items to bypass some of these mechanics like the S Drink or scrolls (that also negate RNG BS) so the player doesn't get stuck so easily.
To me, it looks like Fire Emblem doesn't know what it wants to be:
A build-up strategy game or a strategy game with random elements that also accounts for it.
Currently, it seems like it wants to be both, which is kept together with duct tape (turn wheel)
Unfortunately, the loss of Kaga as part of the development team might have gradually derailed the direction of the franchise the further it moves on and with more ideas that clash with older design philosophies.
I think it’s pretty weird that echoes introduced turn rewind when that game already has a much better system for mitigating permadeath imo with the Lion shrines.
Also I never thought of Fates’ child units that way. Makes me appreciate them more
For me personally, I'd like all available hands on deck, so to say. If a unit falls in battle it means less units on the field. With the rewind mechanic at least there's the option to keep a unit in play instead of after the fact, you know?
Yeah the entire system is bad I think, they already had better solutions to the same problem in earlier games, and even another one in TearRing Saga which is a game that fe7 already ripped off a bunch of things from, but never that mechanic specifically. There is also a free save every 5 turns in Berwick Saga, recently FE has just chosen the worst possible solution to this particular issue that disrupts the game's design and balance far more than any of the other possible solutions.
I personally think the only reason they implemented turn wheel the way they did was to make the late game/post game labyrinths more bearable. That you can refresh them by offering to mila statues makes it feel like turn wheel is balanced around long dungeon dives, rather than the traditional chapter format.
@@orangejuice3235 that is true. The postgame dungeon is the one part of the game where the turnwheel was actually really helpful
Thing is, when use the turnwheel/divine pulse, I don't do it because "I invested resources into the unit", it's because I don't want that CHARACTER to die, because I am emotionally invested. And with the characters get more development in newer games, I get less incentive to let them stay dead.
based view
Yeah that's why letting units die works better in the older games because some of these characters have very little personality and are more of a resource. But with the voice acting now there is so much more life and charm in the characters now than those from older entires, hence why you don't want to see them die.
Yes this is the main reason. Older fire emblem games the characters did not really have developed personalities. They are really no more than a group of stats that you could replace with another unit with similar stats. Newer games people get invested in the characters themselves so that even if another character with exactly the same stats is available you will have lost the character who you have the connection and relationship to.
There just isn't an incentive to leave them dead. Why should I get less options for a death that WILL NEVER MATTER. Like most of the time the only thing that changes with a character death is the Epilogue screen.
@@logansmith2703 and yet people still do it during ironman challenges lol
*Having underlevelled units gain levels much more rapidly* could certainly help, especially if *combined with an adjutant mechanic like in 3H.*
If you can already carry a few reserves from your regular adjutants and then also catch up a unit within 1 to 3 maps, even if that unit is level 1 near endgame, that should help mitigate things alot.
Triangle Strategy did a huge amount of experience rubber-banding like this. It's convenient, but I actually think that's a problem. If any unit can catch up that quickly, it doesn't actually matter at all if they're underleveled. If you lose a character you've invested a lot in, and can just replace them by spending a couple chapters speed-grinding a low level unit up to par, it kind of takes away from the impact of the original character's death. If there's always a bevy of easy replacements to choose from, it becomes difficult to care about losing a unit.
Ultimately, a balance needs to be struck, and that's what's so difficult about this issue. Losing a character needs to be a big event, something that matters a lot. But the player also needs a way to recover from that death that doesn't involve resetting the game. Resetting and replaying the same chapter is boring game design. The death of a character needs to be woven into the gameplay loop in such a way that the game can continue and perhaps even become more interesting once a character dies. And that's also a huge challenge.
@@sand5527 I agree with you about experience rubber banding. In a game without permadeath and infinite grinding it's fine, desirable even. It really works in Stella Glow, letting you use whatever characters you want for any mission which is great because every single unit in that games has completely unique abilities. Fire Emblem however bases it's strategy heavily on the idea of risk versus reward. Weapon durability provides you with the reward of using a strong weapon with the risk of needing it for a critical situation later when it might be broken. Alternatively you can have the reward of saving it for later, but the risk that your weaker weapon might not get the job done and depending on the situation, that can lead to some deadly consequences and it's up to the player to weigh that decision. Chests and Villages are a great example, playing slower is safer, but you may lose out on some very useful items, money, or even a new character. Jeigans, prepromotes, or otherwise higher leveled characters present a similar situation. You can beat the chapter without putting your weaker characters in danger, but if you do they won't get stronger and then well, as the Fire Emblem theme song's Japanese lyrics say, "Invest too much into your strongest warrior and those around him will all be weaklings." (Or something like that, I'm not great at Japanese.) Too much experience rubber-banding makes it too easy the catch up weak units and there's no reason to bother using them because you'll get so much experience later from a just a couple kills when you have a safe opportunity. Too little experience rubber-banding and the player will just juggernaut with strong characters because they're getting similar amounts of exp to the weak ones anyways. Arenas and BEXP allow you to power up weaker characters but still maintain an element of risk/reward.
Fire Emblem is a strategy simulation game and it's important to provide the player with meaningful choices. Unit death is always subject to a large amount of context that is individual to each player's unique experience. Who died, how good are they, what level ups did you get, how far into the map are you, what other characters are available, and so on. Rebecca and Wil are pretty interchangeable but I'm far more likely to reset for Rebecca just because she's hot. Nolan might die in Part 1 endgame and you may consider resetting because he's one of the few characters in the Dawn Bridgade with reliable bulk, but you're near the end of the map, got all the chests and none of the thieves escaped, Micaiah got a blessed level with Hp, defense, and speed, your Nolan is two speed below average, you've saved up a bunch of BEXP for later, and you've been training Aran this playthrough. You could also have the exact opposite situation, the thieves got away with the treasure, Micaiah got magic and res, you gave Nolan the dracoshield earlier, you used up all your BEXP two chapters ago, and you didn't recruit Aran. What's great is deciding to reset is a meaningful strategic decision where you weigh the value of your current progress versus the value of having that unit going forward. But because unit death in 3H has such a high punishment due to the large amounts of investment of limited resources that the entire game is built around, the correct choice is always reset. As a result, Divine Pulse had to be implemented as a QoL and accessibility feature to avoid players ragequitting the game because of the constant resetting despite the fact that it harms strategic integrity by eliminating the consequences of your decisions just like casual mode.
Another great thing about the Shadow Dragon battle saves is that you have to spend a unit's action on saving. So it must be a considered part of your strategy and decision making. Its really well incorporated into the game.
What I like from the ds games is their very large cast, it makes permadeath actually acceptable whereas in three houses the roster is much thinner especially after the timeskip
It however goes against the fully voiced and fleshed out characters from echoes or three houses because it would require many more VA so idk
But this is what I take issue with. *They can easily afford more voice acting and spend more time writing dialogue, fleshing out supports, and expanding on these things.*
That's what people seem to forget. They arent some basement-based indie developer working on pennies and cheap hardware (no disrespect to those folks btw, they're chads for pulling through of course), they're part of a large, massive company with a million dollar franchise. The issue isnt that they can't do it, it's that they won't let their developers have the time and resources to do it.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 no i disagree. Sure they have the budget to make more characters than they do but theres no way that the characters' depth wouldnt be hurt by an enlarged cast. Remember that you only have so many active units that yyou generaly bring into battle and idealy you would want at least most of those units that have some supports with most other units on your main team so they acctually feel like real characters in your army outside of the protag. The more characters you add the more likely it is that the character might end up with no supports in your army. It can already feel like that a little in three houses depending on what units you recruit in which runs so increasing the roster by a lot would no doubt guarantee characters like that
@@thisisanamedontjudge329 This is why you take time to iron all of that out. I'm sorry, but time and effort really do make a difference a lot of the time. I agree that it would still be hard to do, and maybe the cast doesnt have to be as big as FE1's cast, but they can still afford to not only flesh out the units, but to make an army FEEL LIKE AN ARMY and not a smattering of units that barely classify as two DND parties of adventurers in size.
Awakening seemed to handle that issue just fine honestly, and that game had a decently chunky cast size for what its worth.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 3H felt the most like an army because of battalions tho.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958
What y9u said is true but at the same time if you end up with too many characters their respective part in the story will be reduced, Three Houses and Echoes already had a hard time making some characters story relevant beyond one or two chapters
It seems like Engage will go on the smaller roster route, so maybe we'll get a bigger fully voiced cast would be the genealogy remake (copium intensifies)
In my case I usually just restart if someone dies because of the character itself, and not because of their stats or time invested. The odd exception is Shadow Dragon , with all those gaiden chapters though. I kinda ended up *enjoying* offing some characters just to see what would come up in them.
So it’s basically…
“Well if you don’t like it, don’t use it.”
“Well how will I know if I don’t like it if I don’t use it?”
“THEN JUST STOP DOING STUFF!”
I’m Bonus EXP’s biggest fan and I want it to come back as a new way of incentivizing less reliance on turn rewind. Didn’t use turn rewinds? Get a lot of B.exp for it. B.exp has always rewarded good play which would fit great with a system as forgiving as turn rewind
The turnwheel/divine pulse was a great mechanic. It makes perfect sense for it to come back, so I’m pleased to see it.
I agree
I disagree, especially if map design and strategic thinking is suffering massively because of it. Of course, if it's optional, then we can talk shop, as in its a pre-gameplay option when making a new save file, and if you select no, it wont be usable, ever.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958why not just ignore it? It seems like a waste of memory space to make it so you can turn it off and on so it would be better if it was just there and can be ignored instead.
@@shadeofthenight8988 I dont see how it wastes any significant memory space to just flip a flag switch that blacks out the option or makes it selectable respectively during pre-game difficulty selection. Also, temptation is a bastard, like, not everyone can simply not use it.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 I do get what you mean in that sense. In Pokemon X/Y the same debate was had with the modified Exp Share. People said "just turn it off", but as you say, temptation is a bastard.
I'm not going to lie, I absolutely used Divine Pulse to reset, and even played on Casual pretty much all the time, because I loved the characters and didn't want them to die...and I definitely just yolo'd them into high risk high reward situations.
I wish you an earlier New Year Faerghast! I hope you make more content about old and new Fire Emblem games.
I’ve only played two FE games, the first being 3H and the second being the FE1 localization, and I was surprised at how generally accepting I felt having units die without access to Divine Pulse
That being said, I didn’t really think my overall experience with FE1 was all that positive, so I probably have to play another, better game to get my real opinions
I appreciate that you were at least amicable to losing some units. Thats a mindset I wish more fans, modern ones espcially, had. I think FE1 is a good entry, but definitely a product of its time. I recommend FE7 or 8 as your next entry, as those have decent sized casts too :)
you should try some of the GBA games IMO, they're very good
GBA games
I recommend binding blade
I don't think that's a fair-viewpoint since FE1 has literal throw-away characters and more than half the cast are complete garbage you want to die anyway.
@@VioletLunaChan Yeah, and its also the first game in the whole franchise, it set a solid basework for future games to follow, so obviously we arent saying it should just be copied shot for shot on that front. What modern games are doing isnt taking inspiration and working from what was established, theyre abandoning it and are even scared of it.
One other important thing to point out about the SoV turnwheel vs. 3H Divine Pulse is that in SoV you could not turnwheel if Alm or Celica died. It was just an automatic game over. Divine Pulse, on the other hand, allows you to rewind no matter what, even if Byleth or any lords or other game over condition units die. If the rewind mechanic is going to stick around, I think it should follow the SoV system. You still get to rewind in most situations, but there is still an element of risk.
That may have the unintended consequence of handicapping the main character. A fair number of people who tier sov characters give alm an celica lower ratings simply because they can't be turnwheeled and can't change their starting tile. Personally i think fe has enough games where the main character is in the bottom half of all characters.
"It's just a convenience thing! Now I can just save the time I would have spent resetting!", says the player who charges in with zero strategy and turns back time 9 times each map to mess with the rng until they're able to avoid any punishment whatsoever.
Honestly the turn rewinding mechanic is great.
It avoids having to do a full reset of a level for just making a small mistake, it removes the frustration of random one-shots due to bad crit RNG, and it removes the annoyance of the AI overwhelming a powerfull unit out of nowhere (nothing is quite as annoying as a tank who should've been fine unexpectedly dying because the AI manages to hit in 10 back-up attacks in a single turn)
And 99% of the playerbase will never even begin to abuse it, because even with infinite rewinds brute-forcing a level would be boring and time-consuming.
The only thing I'd consider adding to it is maybe some reward for saving charges. It won't stop people from rewinding on deaths, but it will discourage people from attempting stupid stuff just because they know they'll be safe if it inevitably doesn't work.
Tactics Ogre Reborn does this rewinding a lot better I feel. It's always there for you to us, but you get extra rewards if you never use it during the whole campaign. You also get a reward for not letting a single unit killed, so you have to choose between the two when you're doing your campaign.
But since in Tactics Ogre you can recruit as many generic units as you want, it's a lot easier to let them go than in Fire Emblem where you grow attached to your characters.
I've always loved the possibility to get generic units in Fire Emblem because they often look cool and add a neat twist to the global mix, because you don't really care if they die. That's why I love the Capture Mechanic from fates and I hope it will be back on Engage.
It feels like you are only looking at the units as numbers.
I really love the turn-wheel it's saved so much time as I am someone who resets even if a character I don't particularly like dies. Personally I have 2 ways in which I would like to see the turn wheel be addressed in the future.
1. Give rewards based on how many uses left after a chapter. Whether this be something as simple as gold or even the return of Radiant Dawn's Bonus EXP. I admit I am very reckless in modern fire emblem due to the turn-wheel. In Path of Radiance I would play much more defensively, whereas now I pretty much just go full-on attack and rewind when necessary. If rewards were given based on how much uses were left I know I would be a lot more strategically and methodical with any approach.
2. I'd love to see more resurrection fountains like in Echoes Shadows of Valentia. Maybe bringing back dead characters goes against the point of Permadeath, but it'd be another way in which we don't need to rely solely on turn-wheel uses. I'm honestly surprised Fire Emblem hasn't really toyed with the idea of bringing dead characters back to life more in the series.
My solution is usually to send in the armoured units first, so my only use for the turnwheel is if an enemy has an armourslayer or anti-armour mage I didn't see somehow ._.
I am very pro Turn-wheel but I do think the Bonus XP system is an amazing way to get the player to engage the maps in thematic ways and encourage the roleplaying element of the series. I would love the the Bonus XP system to return but now clearly laying out what you need to do because people will just post it online, why bother hiding it.
@@SapphicSara I would honestly fully embrace the permadeath mechanic if the characters would actually react when somebody dies. How is it roleplaying when one of the characters in a tightly knit party dies and nobody bats an eye?
I think limiting the uses is a very good middleground solution. I remember playing Cindered Shadows and that DLC was the hardest maps I've ever faced in the entire series. It was very fun, very satisfying. You had limited resources which impacted it a lot, but the turnwheel was also limited. Only had about 4 or so rewinds per map, so you could test a strat, and rewind if it went bad or you got RNG screwed, but it was limited before you inevitably had to restart. In the main campaign, you get like 12 rewinds per chapter. If we are having more of them, then we should count the enemy turn as 1, but each player movement as one as well, so you can't just restart back to the beginning of the chapter for 1 single use (though at that point restarting is better anyway). I think it's a good mechanic that can help with misinputs and stuff, something I wanted back in the GBA days, but I agree that it's gotten out of control. Hoping we can find a healthy middleground.
This is kind of off topic, but I liked the ability to abuse divine pulses for rerolling bad level ups in 3H. If you played well enough to have surplus pulses you can invest those in better level ups. So maybe coming at it from the other side of rewarding non-use could be an idea, like selling your rerolls if you don't need them.
(In case anyone is wondering how to reroll levels in 3H, here's how: Levels are rolled at the start of a map. So it's impossible to reroll a level during a map, but you can still undo a level and then simply not level up that unit on that map for a fresh roll on the next map.)
Honestly I don't see a problem with how it is. I like it because it lets me just rewind a turn or two when I lose a unit, instead of resetting the whole map. Instead of just playing on casual and throwing all my units at the enemy without caring, I can play on classic and still have to care about my units and strategize, without redoing everything if I mess up.
Does it *really* remove strategy when I still have to think and plan things out despite using it? I don't think so.
No it doesn't. Everything everyone says about more punishment causing you to play better is completely hypothetical. I feel like rewinding turns helps me to internalize better strategies by giving me a chance to experiment with a different approach in real time.
In older FE's, I would just look up a guide or ltc if I had to reset a bunch. It was a super demotivating system.
When it comes to fire emblem I can see where people that are more used to the old systems are coming from with some aspects of the series becoming easier. That said the mechanic is needed now more than before. Why is pretty simple and that is that the series has changed as they put more effort into the characters than just the story. While in past games the characters was easily replaceable they was also much more one dimensional with little to the characters outside of maybe a few things. This was done as they was never meant to stay around like how in gen one pokemon no one ever kept the starter rat or bird and was expected to trade them in for a dodrio or tauros later in the game. In later games the characters became more and more characters with stories and development that if you let them die would be ruined especially if you liked a special character. If say hilda was your favorite you would not simply accept her death just to get a high score unless you was not a character type of guy or girl. While restarting is a possibility it would also become a pain especially on some maps where certain levels of RNG keep popping up such as a unit in place with a killer weapon that for some reason always crits and you can't get to him but he can get to you easy. I feel the system is trying to make one aspect of the game more fair than it was in past entries where it was more common for the game to punish you for its own faults whether that be unfair matchups you could not fix no matter what you did or RNG that for some reason kept popping up. Is the turnwheel broken.. to a degree as even in the best of times there was a bit of absurdity to how many times you could use or how far back you could go which lessing in the times or even cutting down on how far back you could go would help but over all the mechanic is much more fair that most I feel let on simply because the games feel easier. Great video tho.
My favorite memory in any recent fire emblem game was fighting the final post game boss of echoes and i had used up every last turn wheel i had available and i was almost done. It took every last micro calculation and an immense amount of care to win and prevent any unit deaths. I remember just shoving orange after orange into Alm's mouth to keep him alive. In this albeit very specific case, the turn wheel contributed to adding stakes and gave me a ton of enjoyment. Not to say it's implementation is fantastic or anything, but I think it accomplished it's intended design in that moment
Personally, If Intsys is going to be insistent on implementing the feature for accessibility reasons, then they should allow players to toggle it on/off when selecting the difficulty, eg. Hard-Classic-No Divine Pulse. Secondly, I think being able to rewind to any point in the battle is insanely broken, on higher difficulties there should be a max limit like only being able to reverse 3 turns.
Additionally, the mechanic NEEDS to be a finite resource specifically on higher difficulties so that the player doesn't abuse it concurrently making sure the developers don't expect players to use the feature to get out of tough situations due to maps being designed around the mechanic since the player won't have enough anyways. My two cents fr.
My thoughts exactly. The whole point of casual mode is supposed to accommodate the newer players, and now IntSys are forgetting more about that with each passing entry. I can only advocate for divine pulses in the event of mis-clicks
Thank you!! I'm saying this too.
@@zer0name720 I'm honestly sad that modern fire emblem is so scared of it's roots anymore. Like, I don't mind more casual experiences but this is going way, WAY too far at this point, and I fear for the next entry come the next year or two...
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 My sentiment exactly. FE is the most popular SRPG franchise on the planet, it shouldn't forget what made it reach such heights nor alienate those who supported it for years or even decades.
While not an ideal solution, I think I'd rather just have revives. Being able to both undo deaths and reverse time is a bit too powerful imo. With reviving you can have more risks, like having to use a units turn to revive another unit, have revives only give a unit half or even one health, have a revived unit not move after being revived, make revive magic cost health, have it so you can only revive on the next turn after death or else the unit rots, have map design and enemy placement so every turn counts. It still negates perma-death, but at least you can design strategy around it. Rewinding negates both perma-death and strategy.
That said, I kinda appreciate the rewind feature for allowing you to reverse mis-clicks. Though I'd rather have it just be limited to undoing a unit's move provided that they haven't done an action like attacking/healing/etc.
A solution that doesn't seem all that talked about is to rework Classic and Casual mode to fit alongside the turnwheel. Currently, the turnwheel allows Classic Mode to basically be Casual Mode, because when a unit dies you can just go back.
I would propose, instead of changing the turnwheel itself, just to recontextualize it. Make the only difference between Casual Mode and Classic Mode be that Casual has the turnwheel. Both have 'permadeath' in that deceased units don't come back, but allow the turnwheel as a resource when playing casually.
honestly I will have to disagree here for your argument, although it is valid.
having played engage on hard classic without the time rewind for 10 chapters, it was simply annoying having to restart maps I failed in those 10 chapters. not because its annoying to play them again, but because of time. I simply don't have all that much time to give a map 2-3 hours retrying it, specially a long one. It was until chapter 10 in engage where I found myself using it finally, because that map took me 1 1/2 hours to get to the end where in that time I had a unit die by accident. via a misinput no less, I was punished by having a favorite character of mine killed. I was not about to replay the map again that day and spend 3 hours total to have another chance at it, and so I found myself using the rewind system finally, because I simply don't have the time to spend all day beating a map. doesn't help that I play slower than most, as I take my time deciding every move. I can't imagine an FE game being fun without the rewind system now just because of that honestly.
I do think though that if people don't like the system, rather than punishing a player for using the system, they should reward the ones that don't. that could be a good compromise, other than that though, the rewind system is a timesaver for real.
I think that permadeath is honestly the thing that needs to be changed. Losing a unit is losing an asset you’ve invested time and resources in, but they’re also a character the player can become attached to. Even before the turnwheel, people were resetting maps to save characters. If IS made the concept of permadeath more interwoven in the game, it would make it more interesting to let a unit go. This could be like how echoes does it, where there is special after battle dialogue when a unit dies, and there are even different story scenes if characters die (like if Clair or Mathilda die in the chapters you recruit them.) Or they good do something tangible in gameplay, like slightly increased stats for units with high support with the dead character. Or, since there’s always a hub area now, have there be a graveyard with all the fallen characters, maybe even let there be funerals or characters grieving.
I love these ideas. I enjoy ironmanning XCOM much more than FE, and while part of that might just be that everyone is a generic in XCOM, another part might be that one little soldiers’ memorial screen that simply lists your dead soldiers.
I think one reason why Fire Emblem is going in the direction that its going is that games are just way harder to develop for, we expect high quality animations, voiceovers, background/lore and unique personalities for every character. If you want units to die and be replaced then you need to either give the game way more development time or make each individual character come with less features. Considering how popular Three Houses was, and the state of the industry now, I just can't imagine how they can ever go back at this point.
In regards to Divine Pulse, I like it because it allows the player to play a lot more aggressively; putting your units into insane situations and seeing them come out alive is really cool. It does take away a lot of the tension though, as you barely ever have to seriously consider restarting a chapter except on the highest of difficulties. Ideally the game would be balanced so that DP isn't required, or maybe even some sort of reward for not using it at all.
That's sad because I really like the whole S support/children mechanic from awakening and fates and I want it to be back (along with beast and dragon units, I know is a different point but those are my favorite classes)
I'm very much a newcomer to the series (started with 3H, I know big surprise, and played Fates a decent amount although haven't finished that game), but even as a newcomer I felt the turn rewinding was way too powerful. Letting a character die is more of a question of "Will I bother saving them?" instead of being unable to save them. I do think there are some other additions/changes that can be made to fix this issue, that were not mentioned in the video.
1. Make death interesting. Something I was honestly baffled by was how little a character's death affects anything at all. Maybe I missed something (I think I only ever let a character die once permanently, since why would you), but I don't remember anything changing. As a simple example: if Felix dies, you would expect Ingrid to say something about, but as far as I know, she doesn't. Death could be made interesting in two ways: a. story. Add some flavour text for relevant characters mourning the character. Hell, maybe make a dynamic funeral scene for if a character dies. b. gameplay. This is an idea part of a game I have had in my head for some time (but for obvious reasons probably won't actually ever be made): modify relevant characters. Let's take Ingrid and Felix again. If ingrid dies: Felix gets significantly increased critical hit chance against archers, but significantly lowered hit chance against flying types (forgot the term, oops). It could even work as a bit of mechanic to help you, by not adding the negative change. To me it makes sense that the characters does not really become stronger or weaker, but instead changes, yet it could be used to help the player to not get into a negative spiral by making them exclusively stronger. Of course this would likely be a lot of work though.
2. Retreat mechanic. Again an idea for the game I have. Instead of a character immediately dying when hp reaches 0, the characters gets into a retreat state. Here they have either 1 hp or some small amount of secondary hp. They are unable to attack (maybe they can use support magic to heal, teleport away, etc.) but can run away. Then either you could have some square to get to where they can "retreat" so they are safe for the next battle (maybe even with a cooldown?) . You could also have them stay in that state instead and you have to babysit them (thus still a big negative to a character "dying"). And of course if they get hit (or get enough damage if they have more than 1 hp) in their retreat state, then they will permantly die. (I think that the enemies will have to ignore that character during the turn they get "killed", otherwise it might not help much anyway). Hence you still get punished and still have the risk/reward, but the risk is not instant, but very close to death.
3. Make rewinding cost. Possibly the turn rewind could be made an item that has to be bought which is one use only. The cost should evidently be high, otherwise it would be irrelevant. I think that it would also make a lot of sense for the cost to be dependant on the difficulty; make it cheap for easy, very expensive for hard.
Anyway these are some ideas that I have been thinking about before.
the first part is interesting. normally, characters with plot relevance have plot armor and will retreat when defeated, except the lord whose death results in a game over. in older games, characters who die when defeated have no involvement in the plot after their recruitment. the main exception is matthew in blazing blade, as there is one scene (two if you play hector mode) that changes depending on whether he is alive or dead. what you ask is to make scenes like that more commonplace. i support that, and it would greatly help with immersion, but it would also take a lot of time and resources to account for every possibility (to cite your example. if ingrid replaces felix in some scenes, what happens if ingrid dies too?)
I definitely agree with making death more interesting. It's part of the intended gameplay loop, so losing a character should actually add something to the experience. You mentioned dialogue where characters mourn other characters, and they actually did take a tiny step in that direction in Fire Emblem 15. In that game, if you lose the mage Luthier, after the battle you'll get this soul-crushing voiceline when Delthea realizes he's dead. That was as far as they went with it, but even that small change made me more inclined to let characters stay dead.
And there are games that constantly modify a character's stats based on what's going on. Darkest Dungeon is the first example that comes to mind. I agree that it's unlikely this will ever be done in an FE game, but you're right that they really could have character deaths modify the way other characters play.
And yes, the turnwheel needs to cost a resource to use. It almost doesn't matter what resource, experience points, money, whatever, as long as the cost is high.
I feel ya. I like your ideas. Also I just have to say, I 100% agree with the whole story-not-changing-when-someone-dies thing. I felt the same in Awakening and Fates too. Like, everyone just continues on like nothing happened. "We won that battle! Yeah!" 5 minutes later a wholesome support about how happy go lucky the character is, etc. I understand that stuff is hard to change, because there's so much variance, but damn is it jarring when a character dies, and their best friend/husband/wife/child just has no reaction and goes on as if nothing happened.
@@Underworlder5 Yeah, time and resources that IS literally has sitting around with this million dollar franchise. No excuse for laziness.
For me, a new player. The option to rewind is fantastic. Whenever I make a mistake, I can instantly correct it, rethink and retry a different approach. A lot of the time, it’s not bad rng for me; it’s just lack of skill. Honestly as engage is the first game I’ve truly gotten a fair way through, I’ve actually had amazing rng; tons of 5%/10% crits, misses and the like. It makes me anxious about the other games if this is considered bad rng 😬
I personally don’t want to see the turnwheel altered or removed and here’s why.
1. It can be incredibly punishing to restart an entire chapter due to a unit dying. The majority of people playing are not going to let their units die especially as casts get smaller and more concentrated. As an adult with limited time and lots of games to play, its not reasonable for me to restart whole chapters or large sections of it, burning away several hours for nothing. If I didn’t have the option to save scum with turnwheel or save states in older games I would have never bothered to play the older Fire Emblem games that lack a casual mode.
2. Being able to negate a case of very poor luck (unlucky crits, whifs and hits) is extremely valuable and reduces a ton of frustration.
3. Being able to negate something like a misclick is super helpful because it does happen.
4. It lets me use more interesting strategies. Instead of going for the boring turtling approach I can do more offensive tactics without being too afraid of losing a unit.
5. Turnwheel is about the only counterplay besides resetting that you have against cheap ambush spawns. But I would prefer if ambush spawns never returned cause I hate them regardless.
Being entirely honest, I don't really mind Divine Pulse/Dragonic Time Crystal as long the game isn't forcing you to use the feature, which in 3Hs, can be argued to be kind of an issue given from Chapter 2's main mission onwards, the game *forces* you to use it every time Byleth dies.
This might be a me thing, but it rubs me the wrong way when game developers, rather than providing optional features that can let more inexperienced people finish their games, instead decide to make such features *mandatory* , which, in an unrelated note, this is partly the reason why I eventually dropped from the latest mainline Pokemon games (seriously, I don't wanna play in Switch mode and with the Exp. Share always On). So I hope that Engage's Dragonic Time Crystal at least decides to keep the feature as it was with 3Hs' Divine Pulse (or heck, maybe even return to how SoV's Mila's Turnwheel did it).
I was about to mention Pokemon, and I wholeheartedly agree. The funny part is that I'm one of the people who WOULD use it because, guess what, I hate grinding with a passion outside of small bursts, but I don't exactly enjoy knowing others who dont want it are being forced to use it.
I've been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn and that game has a rewind feature, but I never use it because the game is actually well designed. If I'm struggling with a map, I usually reset the whole thing so I can reconsider my unit builds. It's clear that the new Fire Emblem games are designed with rewinding as a mechanic, not a feature. They should make good maps and gameplay with no consideration for rewinding. Three Houses, especially on maddening, felt like it was at least partially designed around rewinding and it sucked.
Literally this ^^^
Divine Pulse does not need some sort of reward tied to not using it. Doing so would only go against the very purpose it was originally implemented in the first place; to save people from having to reset and replay a chapter. Tying a reward to not using divine pulse means when you make a mistake you will no longer get the max rewards at the end of a chapter and will want to reset the map to get full marks. It will no longer feel like a reward for not using it but rather it will feel like a punishment for using it.
I'll always advocate for FE11/12 save points to return because they require you to predict/account for future failures instead of being a band-aid solution of "oops i screwed up time to rewind"
having to decide whether it's worth saving before a tough section, after a tough section so you don't have to do it again or even to solidify a super blessed level up you don't want to lose is a really interesting decision you have to make on the fly (and the added requirement of having to waste a unit's turn activating the save point can add further deliberation if you want to save on a frantic turn).
It retains the series tension of "one mistake and you're dead" without making you face the heavy ultimatum of restarting a whole chapter from scratch or letting a unit stay dead. You're still always at risk of losing something to bad RNG/poor strategy but it's not nearly as severe which is a great middle ground imo.
Except that you have all the time in the world to save whenever you want and there's ALWAYS a save point near your starting position, meaning you always have a safe option in Literally every map
I agree that it's better system than time rewinding altogether but it's still broken
Great video, glad to hear about FE4’s utilization of things. One extra thing I’d like to note is that in FE4, you can only save at the START of a turn, and one confirmed action locked you out of it. Along with this and FE4’s fixed seed RNG, it funnily made it so there was a “learning curve” to save scumming.
I’m not saying every game should go this direction, but for FE4, the game wants you to use everyone and keep everyone alive, so that along with these choices makes me believe the game was made with save scumming in mind. You want a better level-up? You gotta learn how to progress the seed. Can’t get through the arena battle because you missed twice? Load the save and try things again in a different order.
Save scumming in this sense isn’t really “exploiting” anything because the designers knew you would do it and thus chose how you would interact with it, making you still play by their rules as silly as it sounds!
If the main point of the turn wheel is to avoid mistakes or bad rng that would lead to the loss of a unit then what is the reason for having casual mode? I thought casual mode was introduced so that players wouldn't have to worry about losing units.
The turnwheel was invented to increase the pace of play. Before you could spend an hour just to get rng screwed and would have to reset and lose your past hour. You really lost nothing but time and it's a waste. Is the turnwheel over tuned? Yes, but is been an overall benefit. Hell many fe youtubers use save states when playing older fe games because it saves time.
Casual mode is mostly for people truly struggle with the turn-based genre. I had a friend who struggled with fates casual normal mode. He enjoyed the game but isn't invested enough in the fe genre to "get good". Casual mode also allows you to play at your own pace. Some people like to play with casual mode and still reset/turnwheel for characters. They just like to be in control of the pace they play at. Personally i feel that casual mode should be locked to normal mode though.
I don't get why people are angry at the time controlling mechanic, I want more FE games, making the games more tedious to play is just going to turn away casual players. Yeah hardcore fans will still play the games but hardcore fans alone nearly caused the series to be cancelled all together. Penalizing players for turning back time is just going to make people drop the game and they probably won't pick up the next games and we'll end up in an FE cancelation territory again. Casual players are necessary for the survival of any series, without them there's just not enough money
Just beat Binding Blade recently and I have to agree, what happened to Ranked Mode? Its honestly kind of weird its not around anymore to check out our overall performance. I think if we had something like that in combination with a turnwheel mechanic it would probably fix things
I think IS realised a lot of casual players would get upset if the game dared to imply they didn't play well, so it was removed.
I would love ranks and achievements. It could possibly give bonuses for new save files and maybe unlock special items or characters. Let casuals do their thing and reward the dedicated players.
They probably got rid of rankings because a lot of the requirements were weird or conflicting. For example, the funds rank encourages resource hoarding. You were punished for not picking up relics and for actually using good weapons. Then you have the combat rating that punishes you every time you enter combat and don't kill. That means that being unable to retaliate due to range and just tanking in general is punished. Feeding units kills is also punished. The exp rank is basically counter all of the other ranks. You have to sacrifice your turn counts, your funds, and your combat ratio to raise a bunch of other units that normally wouldn't see the light of day. They probably should have kept the tactic rank but that would force IS to actually playtest their games to figure out what is realistic and what isn't.
I think that a good way to balance the trunwheel would be to add additional ways to spend your points, such as using two or three to get a free crit, maybe spend 5 to give a unit another turn. This would provide tactical options to use proactively at the cost of your safety net. this way everyone would still have the assurance the turnwheel provides while giving experienced players who don't need it a new resource to manage ant use in their strategies.
I'm not sure on this mechanic. It's mostly because I get frustrated having to figure out, in advance, what is even happening, what position I want to even be in, and if it's even possible to do so. It's a lot to consider.
Although I knew of Fire Emblem before awakening, Awakening is where it sort of clicked with me. But over time, I've noticed I'd rather take the easier route. All the planning I do, all the calculations I do in my head, it tends to just... Not happen and I either get unlucky, a situation I need to keep in mind more, or make a moronic decision that costs me a unit and basically a reset. In those situations, I'm happy the wheel is there. Though I ought to have used it more, I generally just do a reset.
However, all these points take my more negative experiences with the series in mind. I do love to see the relationships grow. Getting even more powerful allies to do even more. Yet, due to the threat of losing a unit forever, should I move a unit into range of too many attacking enemies, I barely experiment or figure out how to deal with a highly threatening, since the risk tends to outweigh the reward to me.
Even moreso when you consider a character in fates: Rinkah. No player, without outside help, for the first time, would know that she is really damn bad. Her growths are in completely useless areas and she barely gains stats. While we have the internet and such things can be looked up later, how am I supposed to know that a unit like her would suck HARD!? Another one is Hilda. In a playthrough I did, she basically became useless, because her stat growths themselves were appalling, I was highly unlucky on that front. And something like that is really frustrating when you hear of a playthrough where she is a beast.
All this to say that fire emblem tends to leave me consistently frustrated. Outside of a normal playthrough on casual mode, without cheesing the hell out of the game with suicide attacks, feels like it suits me so much more. Because while I enjoy a hard game, it feels like fire emblem just wastes time. And that's the last thing I seek in a game.
The rewind has a lot of potential to be turned into an interesting mechanic beyond an undo button and keep it always available, like one or a combination of the following.
-make the rewind a resource that instead of starting at a high number, starts at 0 and you have to build up during a chapter.
-make it a skill with a conditional trigger.
-make rewind cost availability of a specific unit.
-make rewinding only available during enemy phase
-make rewinding into enemy phase relevant by giving a small stat boost to the unit that died so they may survive combat in exchange of being weaker in some way or receiving less experience.
-make it reduce unit experience
-make rewinding something that you can "plant" on an unit or enemy unit during the chapter, that sets off like bomb that only affects a specific area once conditions have been met.
-make it so you carry the results back in time through some condition.
-be able to use more resources to unify different timelines, make an unit's action turn into another unit's action, etc,
plus many others.
OR a more simpler and interesting solution would be to have the same mechanic as Sekiro has with it's resurrection system.
You can choose whether you want or don't want to have the mechanic available to you (in sekiro, you have the option to gain an item to revive once more if you are killed in combat and continue for the rest of the game. You can also reject the item and for the rest of the game you cannot revive to continue) or add a consequence by using said system (in sekiro if you died to many times and revive to continue the battle and not die naturally and return to the mini shrine, important npc's will start getting sick and die because of you).
I feel like it's been 10 years or so since permadeath was even a relevant mechanic. I sometimes wish the game autosaved every action to prevent resetting or rewinding, but then I realize how not fun that would be most of the time. Maybe a system that rewards players for not resetting/rewinding? Casual mode was its own setting back in the day, but now it's just integrated into every difficulty. The scripted character deaths in modern games do not have the same weight as losing a tactically important unit that you've gotten to know over the course of a playthrough
Not being able to reset is called an iron man which is a challenge run some people do. If they forced that upon the player base i think sales would drop by 90%
@@gameboyn64 not resetting isn’t an itonman. An ironman means if you fail a chapter you start over. Classic mode is just losing units.
@@xenmaster2203 dude, look up fire emblem iron man on CZcams.
This is probably the cleanest version of this entire concept/debate I've seen, and as always is great content, but I have two observations I'd like to make, and I sincerely hope you see this Ghast.
One, you *do* bring up the "if you don't like it, don't use it" argument, but then dismiss it with a simple, at least I think this is what you're trying to say, 'but if it's there I'm gonna use it". This sounds to me like you are saying that because you, and I know there are others but keep in mind here you are saying that because *you* like challenge runs and more difficult content, that the option *should not exist* for players who don't agree, because it's uncomfortable for you to self-impose a challenge on yourself, the game has to provide *all* the challenge itself. I can get where you are coming from but challenge runs like Nuzlokes are popular for all *kinds* of game, forgive me but I just don't see why this argument is meant to be compelling.
Secondly you bring up the beginning of another argument, when mentioning save features and save-scrumming, but I feel like you don't really deliver it home. The argument that players have been resetting when characters die long before the turnwheel, so much so that input codes were implemented in at the very least Awakening and Fates to accomplish just that. Holding the shoulder buttons, then pressing start, takes you *right* back to the title screen without so much as a load screen. The turnwheel is taking a behavior players of the series have been doing for a long time, and putting convince on it.
Lastly, there's your statement that current games are "way too forgiving for sloppy play". Now, this is just my personal take but as someone who has been cutting her teeth on FE games since the Wii (not since the very beginning, I hope that doesn't invalidate my views) My mistakes have often lead to resets. The *only* times I keep a character death is with a long chapter, managing to pull through but only by losing someone, and not knowing if I could do it better another time. And yes, largely the turnwheel eliminates that. But what we gain, as a game mechanic, is saved time. *not* needing to chapter reset when we make *one* mistake, and I don't think learning what you did was wrong, immediately trying something else, is a worse way to learn than making a mistake, then having to *completely* reset the battle and do the whole thing again, and potentially forgetting what you did wrong only to repeat it. It feels less like the games are ignoring mistakes, and more that you might be assuming people today just aren't bothering to learn just because they are learning it differently, like how parents look down on their kids when new technology makes life easier.
I really hope this doesn't come off as angry or hostile, I *love* your content even when I don't agree, and this is again the best video I've seen on the topic and I'm so glad it's out there and does show multiple sides to the problem. Have a great day and I hope you have a blast with Engage.
A huge deterrent to losing units in modern Fire Emblem is that they're (usually) good characters that can't be replaced by late-game units that likely have far less build-up. Nowadays, units are more than just assets or scripts of numbers, they're people that the audience are invested in.
So here's a solution to that: have the game's story acknowledge fallen characters and do interesting stuff afterwards. For a few examples...
If a character dies during a chapter, then the end-of-chapter cutscene changes in tone, giving a feeling of "we've won, but at what cost?" Perhaps extra character specific scenes could be tagged onto most chapters where someone mourns someone else's loss earlier in the fight.
If a character is important or at least relevant in a later cutscene, have their absence be acknowledged by other characters, and in rare cases significantly change the scene altogether.
In games like Three Houses with a home base, close friends or rivals of a fallen character won't be in their usual place during 'free time' on a given month but will instead be at the gravesite or their fallen comrade's room or some other place they liked, thinking about the recent loss.
You could even have branching 'support conversations', where if a character dies at B rank, then instead of their usual A rank conversation, the surviving character has a scene all to themselves trying to come to terms with the death and make sense of the loose threads left untied.
Perhaps normal conversations could change in tone depending on how many characters have or haven't died. Conversations can be consistently more optimistic and upbeat if all is going well, but shift to heavier topics or just be darker in tone if casualties pile up.
TLDR: Fire Emblem stories often focus on the costs of war, and none is ever greater than the human cost, but the stories don't ever capitalise on that by acknowledging when player characters die outside of scripted events.
Change that, and you have a permadeath system that appeals even to those of us who play for the story and characters first and foremost.
I think I’ll treat my first playthrough of Engage as an ironman and see how I feel about the necessity of the turnwheel after my first playthrough. I reckon if we get a Maddening setting it’s absolutely valid to use since it’s very unforgiving but the game needs this feature for the people who desire a chill/storyline experience
Game on the website was confirmed to have Normal, Hard, Maddening.
Honestly, I don't hate it, but I find it to be a bit...much, ya know? I kinda don't want it around, to be honest. That said, I begrudgingly concede that at LEAST when they implemented it in 3h, it was a game built around it. Better to have this mechanic built around the game, than for a game to have it slapped on.
Now, as for the turnwheel itself, I think it deserves a place as a staple in future games if, and ONLY IF, it's made an optional part of your save file's difficulty setup, when it asks you which difficulty mode you wanna play on and if you prefer casual or classic mode. Have the turnwheel be an option too, and select yes or no, that way it does what those other options did, and lets more people be satisfied based on personal preference. Obviously, I would prefer that a game is not built around it either, and is instead focused on your strategic thinking and clever map design.
But most of all, above any other aspect of fire emblem's gameplay? I yearn for them to go back to having large casts, while using their plentiful money to take time and effort into fleshing those cast members out, regardless of overall relevance. I like the idea of the games being based around losing SOME units over the course of the journey, and wish these games werent so scared to do so anymore. After Echoes (and even then it only got away because it was a remake and had to be faithful, though then again it was a unique specimen in the series to begin with) I think the series just...gave up on it, ya know?
3H relied *heavily* on Divine Pulse, to the point where even on Classic mode, you were playing Casual mode. People make the argument: “Don’t use it,” but the problem is that the game is *designed* around using it. Not using Divine Pulse is just not fun, because you either literally just can’t continue playing if you lose someone important, or the game becomes exponentially harder. On higher difficulties this is especially true, because units are way harder to replace, and player hit rates can range anywhere from 40%-80% at best. Ghast also didn’t mention that 3H has ways built into the map to artificially use Divine Pulse, like ambush spawns that have no indication to players and almost always result in 1 or 2 deaths.
What I want, and am hoping for from Engage, is less reliance on the “turnwheel” mechanic. I want to be able to play the game without it. I’d prefer Ghast’s proposed option 2: where the game provides a steady stream of a variety of characters as the game progresses, with a few notable lategame powerhouses. This gives variety to the characters, and makes each individual strength more notable. I’d expect the chapter 12 30 year old mercenary to be naturally stronger than the recruit you got in chapter 2. And if you get everyone at the beginning of the game, they’d have to be the same strength; that wouldn’t be realistic or memorable. Anyone who’s played FE7 remembers how much of a badass Pent is, same with FE10 Zihark and FE Fates Ryoma. Those are the gold standards of recruitable pre-promoted characters, and it saddens me that we don’t see those anymore.
I feel it’s perfectly fine to have the turn wheel mechanic. The only thing I feel should be changed is have it scale based on difficulty. So higher difficulty and depending on if you’re playing classic and casual mode you have less uses. I feel it would be the best of both worlds. New players who would choose easier difficulty have many uses, while those that want a challenge this would add to that
Another easy solution would be to make the rewind mechanic be an optional mode, on top of the choice of Casual and Classic. This way the player gets to choose how they want to experience the game, and the game doesn't need to be balanced around the mechanic. They literally don't need to think too hard about it, and I think everyone would be happy. Those who like rewinds can play Classic mode with rewinds. Those who don't want rewinds can play without rewinds while also not affecting their game, as it would no longer be a resource the developers are expecting you to use. That's why I believe making it an optional mode would be the simplest solution.
The way I see it if the developer didn't want me to use a mechanic than they wouldn't have put it in the game or say something about the mechanic that would discourage me from using it.
Just add a toggle to turn it off, I am sorry but it all just comes down to self control in the end. For an example, pokemon has an affection system where if you play with your pokemon they will gain affection, when you max it out they will crit almost every time, survive multiple attacks at 1 hp and shrug off status. This makes the game very easy, but I as a player have to make a conscious decision to use it, as long as it is not automatically applied (like in the gen 4 remakes) I do not use it and it does not affect my gameplay. It is the same with rewinding or "save scumming" (which I never thought of to get around bad rng level ups thanks for the suggestion) the game doesnt take control and make you do it, it is almost a non issue. If the option to use it is too great, just burn all the uses at the beginning of a battle.
In the gen 4 remakes you could just heal with herbs. The herb shop is available before the second gym and well before affection starts to have an effect. Its mildly annoying but isn't that difficult to deal with.
@@gameboyn64 Yeah, I ended up doing that too, it is a pain but not the worst in the world
An idea that I think could improve the turn wheel system is to add an additional point system called something like “Phoenix Points” where you start out with 3 (can upgrade to 5) and every time you use the turn wheel to revive someone, you must spend 1 Phoenix Point to do so. The big difference from regular turn wheel uses is that the total number of uses would only replenish by 1 (to a cap of 3 to 5) at the end of each story chapter or paralogue. This keeps the benefits of the turn wheel but creates possible long term consequences by over-relying on it. It also makes you think about cascading consequences by creating a scenario where multiple units die becomes way more problematic. It also makes you think about making reckless moves as you might want to conserve Phoenix Points for a later possibly harder map.
I like this. It's kind of like over-using your Jeigan--you might be screwing yourself long-term, so that's motivation not to rely on it too much.
This might be problematic. The classic "i hit end turn by accident" becomes an automatic reset. It also makes a series of catastrophic rng an automatic reset.
i feel that the turnwheel is also an answer to the ever growing attachment fans feel over the characters since awakening, since it's that game where the support system has gotten way more in depth, and after three houses that feeling got magnafied, the cast from that game is phenomenal and it goes without saying the support system has gotten even better. People don't want to lose their favorite characters/pairings, period
This is exactly it. If intelligent systems could dump the perma-death system without too much backlash they would do it.
@@hassam363 They’d be abandoning one of the biggest and beautiful niches of their franchise just because they refuse to try striking a balance.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 It's because the balance is nearly impossible to strike.
One thing I like that 3 houses did is if you reverse time and do the same thing again it will always end the same way you can't just keep rerolling It was only designed to save your allies can't be use just because you're unhappy how an attack went
For example you attack with a 99% chance still miss. Oh well I will just rewind time and just attack with that same unit again. It will still miss because you didn't try out new
It was funny watching Alpharad not realize this lol
I have for a long time been thinking there should be a slight insentive to play with less rewinds and here is what I thought of:
Now rewinds are normally tied to a Goddess, be it Milla or Sothis, so why not tie a rewind to a Goddess of Fortune and Chance. Before every battle, you select how many rewinds you want to bring into battle and depending on the percentage, the enemy drops/chests will change. Example, boss drops a sword when you kill him;100-66% he will drop an iron sword, 66-33% he would drop a steel sword and 33% to 0% he drops an armorslayer, which will help in the next chapter. Not gonna give any for 0% so people can still bring atleast 1-2 so they don't break their game cause they got a 2% crit on a 53% hit during turn 20.
The only issue I see with this is that it is a positive feedback loop, meaning that if you don't bring the rewinds, then you have better equipment/stat boosters so you are less insentivised to bring rewinds in latter chapters, and if you DO bring any, they you don't have the better gear/stats so you will be relying on rewinds to save you more often.
i get they added it to stop perma-death, to help newer players into the series, but i feel like that's what Casual mode is for anyway. Casual stops any units from being lost forever, so the turnwheel ends up being pointless. well, not entirely, since the unit is still lost until the next chapter so won't gain exp until then.
it's hard to say what the best play for them to do is, as different people have different ideas of what works.
Turn Wheel/ Rewind Mechanic just needs to go entirely. We have Phoenix Mode for fuck's sake... If people don't want to care about battles, fine, I can live with that, but don't open Pandora's Box for those of us who actually take the time to get good at tactics. Nothing is more of a bastardization to a tactical game than trivializing the battles within it. If y'all want Fire Emblem to be a visual novel, you can literally just petition that as a spin-off game title or get an anime made.
I think another way to balance out the rewind mechanic would be to let players use the resources for other things than a rewind. For instance granting players protection from ambushes for a turn. My idea is to allow you to burn a resource for the time mechanic before the ambush is triggered. Once the enemies show they would be hit with an effect that prevents them from acting until the wnd of their following turn. This would give players an option to either ambush the enemy or at least get units out of danger. This could also be used alongside rewind but would naturally consume double the resource.
I like the turn wheel. I don't use it very much, but I am glad it's there because it respects my time. I think it has too many uses, but at the same time I've never used it more than once on a map and there are many maps where I don't use it at all, even on Hard. I'm sure I would use it on Maddening more though, but I don't like ambush spawns so the mode doesn't interest me. It's why I don't play Awakening on hard mode. Having Lissa dying to a flyer ambush spawn is just too frustrating and I wish the turn wheel was there in Awakening.
I think a better question to ask though is, Why is casual mode still there? With the turn wheel, I don't see why casual mode needs to exist. Do players really need both casual and the turn wheel?
I think there should be an option to turn the turn wheel off. I would never turn it off - I don't want to waste my time replaying 90% of a map - but I can understand why people do and why they might want an achievement or something for beating the game without it.
Rewards player playing carefully. It's like playing a chess tournament and when you lose a piece you can call time out and ask the the ref to revive a piece whenever you want.
@@SyLuX636 Okay. As an option though. Don't want to be the guy in a chess tournament calling time? Then don't. It's so simple yet so many people cry about it.
@@nannersnanners9841 ah the old easy argument of if you don't like it don't use it. the problem is that the game forces you to use it either way if you lose an easy game like 3H somehow.
@@SyLuX636 Ah, yes, the old easy argument... which is objectively correct. The game only "forces" you to use the divine pulse if The lord or Byleth die-- at which point you'd have to reset anyway from the gameover screen. It's so easy to not use the Divine pulse at all but you just need something to cry about.
@@SyLuX636 Man, I sure hate how Fire Emblem games allow you to go into the settings and turn up the text speed. Sure, I could just not change the speed of the text, but that's not good enough. I motion for Intelligent Systems to remove this setting from not just my game, but everyones game because that's how I want it.
Maybe what we can do in the new game is you get something like time shards Wich you could use to get bonus exp or rare items. Which you obtain from leftover rewinds
Love this
Never had an issue with the Turnwheel. It really is just a tool used to circumvent bad RNG for me. Though, it feels redundant to have it alongside casual mode since permanent death isn't a factor there.
Think I have a very interesting concept for this
I'd just hope for unique enemy units which I would call chrono mages. These will be massive targets as there one gimmick is preventing using the turn rewinding. I loved the retreat chapter in engage where you lose the time wheel temporarily any unit that dies while you aren't in possession of it is gone for real. Making a unit responsible for preventing the ability to turn back time has so much potential. They are super high value targets for your army which helps with map design. You can sink a ton of resources to go fight the chrono mage on the left side of the map but then you might not have enough time to go and loot the chests on the other side of the map. At the same time you can completely ignore the chrono mage and rush the chest giving you plenty of time to get the loot but now your troops are facing a risky perma death. If the time crystal is going to be a key feature in Fire Emblem then the enemies should also be able to effect it there is so many new dynamic map designs and stratagies that could be added into the game by just adding the chrono mages.
They can also be balanced in lots of different ways they might be a unit that is just like the martial monk making them fairly weak on their own where the enemy defends them with a small squad. Or they could have multiple health bars like the minibosses in engage. Either way more maps should play with the idea of limiting the ability to turn back time.
They necessarily don't even have to be a unit maybe a large crystal the enemy is defending and if shattered bam you have the ability to turn back time. If the enemy had an active way to stop our use of divine pulse or the dragon crystal I'd argue that in times where we have beaten the side objective of either smashing the crystal or defeating the chrono mage we should have unlimited charges. Its just so much more interesting having certain sections where you have to really play carefully or face consequences than as it currently is as a mechanic that is just always active and makes you relatively safe from anything.
But I'd love seeing early maps be the classic ones we have now and somewhere through the story the enemy realizes we are altering time to are favor and makes a countermeasure to stop us. This would make for a great difficulty curve with narrative impact on the story. early maps are easy letting new players get use to the series and understand divine pulse but later in the gameplay the enemies make it harder limiting your divine pulse at various stages of the map. maybe you are on a sneak attack and hit the enemies by surprise and once you initiate the first combat or the enemy patrol's sees you. the enemy realizes and sends out a scout that will turn on a machine to remove divine pulse from the rest of the map in x turns. This could make for an interesting steal idea where you sneak in with a small squad designed to get to the machine first and prevent it from turning on either sabotaging it or just defending it so the enemies can never get to it. Then you can send in your main army through the front gate without worrying. Just hundreds of fun ideas can come from the idea of yeah we keep to idea of being able to roll back mistakes BUT we allow the enemies to affect it and incorporate that into the map design.
I also like the idea of mixing this with the Valkyrie staff as yeah some people no matter what will reset the chapter if a unit dies at all so having the valk staff as a backup for the hard sections where your resources are most limited would be really good. Hell maybe you will start a run with a risky Strat to get the map loot before the thieves. This leaves one of your units dead. Then you slowly push the secondary objectives before pushing the final boss. Reclaim your ability to turn back time go over to their corpse and revive them for the final engagement. might make things really easy defiantly make the valk staff rare and super limited uses but allowing for the most strategies is the most important thing in a game like fire emblem..
In 3 houses specifically since the time pulse was linked to Byleth and randomly was shown to have heart pain in some pains wouldn't it have been cool for there to have been some kind of cost or debuff for over use inflicted onto Byleth
Excellent points! I really do think that the Turnwheel is overpowered if someone wants to improve at FE instead of just beating the game. Resetting a chapter for a unit is already not the "intended" way to play for more than half of the franchise, but I always found it to be a suitable punishment, because you're allowed to remake strategies at the cost of possibly a ton of time and good levels lost. It is a choice with very weighted sides, a choice which most games reward you after gritting your teeth and pushing through the loss.
I'll never forget "ironman-ing" FE 3 Book 1, because my cartridge couldn't save, and losing Caeda right at retaking Alteia/Aritia. I just needed to go forward. This happened about 6 years ago, too.
However, looking at it as a QoL, it is fantastic for more casual players that want to beat the game, but I'd have at least presented an option to not use it during a campaign, seeing as it can feel really tempting to use for those who don't want it.
The Shadow Dragon mid chapter saves are the best system for me, and I will keep pushing for it. There are ways to design a map that is challenging, but not BS with unpredictable ambushes that necessitate turn by turn resets. One or two mid chapter saves should be enough.
I think it would be best as a mode besides difficulty that you select at the beginning of the game. Then maps could be designed assuming someone is using mid chapter saves as opposed to the turnwheel.
To me, I really think the reason for the turn wheel reflects how the FE developer's philosophy of their games has shifted with the resurgence of the franchise. Older games obviously threw tons of characters at you expecting them to die with more characters to replace them. But recently, I think they've realized how integral the characters themselves are to the fan base, and now expect a decent majority of them to want to keep everyone alive. The persistence of the turn wheel is now more so for the sake of convenience for people to keep their units alive without the hassle of a full reset. However, I do think it needs to be balanced in a way to help players still think about their strategy instead of falling back to turn wheel to an action that was likely gonna fail if they thought about it a little longer
I kinda like your idea of a ranked mode, essentially letting you rewind the timeliness, but the game will still remember that death and incorporate it into the score.
My personal idea is to make the turnwheel something that has to be charged up throughout each map and earn uses of. As for how its charged not too sure, maybe after every 5 turns you get one use, or instead builds up with each action done (attack, rally, dance, heal, reposition, movement, etc...) And each use is limited to a certain number of turns you can rewind, so one use = up to 3 turns rewind. But you can build up more uses in order to rewind further (ex: 1 = 1-3 turns, 2 = 4 turns, 3 = 5 turns). Furthermore, maybe the turn wheel is something that can be upgraded with a skill tree to fit your play style. One can upgrade to increase the maximum # of uses you can build up. Or you can instead make it so the turn wheelbuilds up faster. Maybe even upgrade it so each use can go back more turns than normal. While I think the action that will trigger the time wheel being charged could use work. I think this is a good idea to make the turn wheel a resource to strategize around. While I think maybe having turn wheel build up passively based on turns can easily be cheese by end turning a ton to build it up, I think it will ultimately depend on the game itself. Is it the type of game with objectives or rout the enemy, or do so and so within 10 turns. Games of the former can easily break thr system, but games of the latter make the turn wheel more as a limited resource. Of course the turn wheel may also vary on difficulty, like normal mode makes it so you start every map with 3 uses already, a opposed to hard having none needing charge.
I think save points are better and work as whole because unlike the turnwheel, you choose one point in time you can go back to. Sure you can save every turn, but if you saved at a spot where you will inevitably lose a unit 1-2 turns down the line, you can't just load an earlier save state, making it more balanced imo.
On my first playthrough, I completed Echoes without the turnwheel, but I I sometimes feel I might as well not have done so, because there is no trace left that I did...
other than my own vague memory of it.
It would be nice if there was a icon or perhaps a counter in the game, so I can prove to myself that I did it. I think it's fun to look back on past achievements.
Moreover, I don't think I would have ever attempted, let alone completed, a fresh file maddening mode run if not for the memento you get at the end.
Idea: what if instead of having a turn wheel, Alear has a unique action he/she can take where they put down a “beacon” and rewind the time to the point they put it down? I’m thinking 2 min, maybe 5 max uses, can only have one down at a time, and doesn’t activate automatically on Alear’s death in combat, meaning that the player still has to reset if they lose Alear, like with a lot of the other Lords/Avatars. Just a thought, would love to here some feedback.
I'll be honest, I am *pro* turnwheel but I'd still love to give this a try.
Ah, to go back to the days where lords weren't worth the hassle and you just kept them in back forever at level 3
And by that I mean Roy and Micaiah
This sounds like a pretty good alternative to me. Like save points with a bit more player control. I think part of turnwheel's raw potential was being able to select precisely what actions were undone. With this, you can't just press the turnwheel button to undo a mistake if you completely ignored something dangerous. The player has to actively predict their strategy going wrong and put down a "save point", which might go unused but also might not. Hopefully a game that has this mechanic would also forgo terrible design decisions like completely unwarned ambush reinforcements. So long as the player is paying attention and thinking about what will happen, then I think they can be rewarded for it with a few retries.
In my opinion I think the turn wheel system should be taken out of the series or if it has to remain, add the ability for units to die in casual mode, but allow the use of a turn wheel. This way you still can have the turn wheel but still have thr option of perma death in both modes
I think the problem with just removing the turnwheel is that the mechanic was introduced in the first place to patch over an issue that Fire Emblem has always had: The way it handles perma-death in the first place. Resetting a chapter is boring. The turnwheel is also boring, but a lot more convenient.
I honestly think that if the turnwheel is removed, we've still got an underlying issue: How do we make the player continue to play the game even AFTER losing a unit? I think there are all sorts of things FE could do to make death more interesting. Another comment on this video addressed maybe having units grieve for their fallen comrades.
If a unit dies, those close to them would get unique dialogue mourning them, and on the gameplay side the game could permanently alter a grieving unit's stats and/or abilities, so that you can basically get characters that are unique to your playthrough based on who died.
Am I the only one who thinks having the threat of losing your characters-ones you've level-grinded and cared for-is one of the magical pillars of the franchise? It's always felt a little cheap now that you can just 'oopsies'. The risk is what made the characters so much more real to me.
To be honest, I think having a couple rewinds are pretty great. I have lost so many hours and nearly perfect runs to crappy RNG. Having rewinds doesn't change how I approach anything, it just saves me from restarting an entire level due to dice rolls, or missing the one thing that I overlooked.
I personally want this mechanic to always be present in some way. I NEED some way to avoid the SOUL CRUSHING need to reset the entire map….cuz, call me crazy, but even though I play on classic every time, I am NEVER allowing a single unit of mine to die. I just will not allow it.
Echoes had the opportunity to introduce a penalty for Turnwheel by requiring sacrifices to Mila. You already do it for fatigue, so it wouldn't be a stretch to need to sacrifice high quality food to give you a glimpse of the future (which is canonically how Mila's Turnwheel works, contrasting with Three Houses and Engage mechanics.
I've played every single FE game multiple times each from fe1 on snes forward. The way I have always played through included not letting anyone die, ever, not anything to do with losing exp commitment for that character. Time crystal has been a godsend for helping save me time resetting the full stage when I inevitably miss 4 90+% attacks in a row and then the surviving unit kills one of mine with a 2% crit. Could have less charges than it does now, but I absolutely do not want to see it go away.
I dont really have a problem with the wheel mechanics. It is not hard to ignore if you dont like it (I find that "its not in the spirit of the game" arguement stupid.) If i had to change something just make the turn amount difficulty dependant and or give the option to disable it.
I preferred how Echoes used the system compared to 3H.
In echoes you didn't get nearly as many uses and it also had the handicap that you couldn't use it if alm or celica died. So maybe something more like that might be a way to better balance it or maybe make it like 3 at max and it uses more the longer back you need to go?
I think 3H had the problem of ironically being designed with the system in mind. It expects you to yolo your units onto the frontlines all the time and without anything really holding you back from doing it + the very basic map design, it gets very easy to abuse and becomes a hard crutch. Especially when as stated in 3H, you really don't want to loose units with how much time the game expects you to put in with them.
I think the system can work. I do think some kind of reward each chapter without using X amount of turnbacks or no turnbacks might help incentive better planning on using it with the system above of only 3 smaller wheels, I could see something like that being attempted in the future.
So fe echoes give you 12 turnwheel use while fe3h maddening give you 10 uses and both start with 3. The main difference is that the echoes turnwheel increase is more spread out and are easier to miss
One thing I like doing to reduce my number of get out of jail free cards is using Divine Pulse for random stuff like if I immediately notice I've placed a unit suboptimally, or a equipped a steel sword instead of iron, then I'll use a Divine Pulse instead of just going with it. Sometimes I'll just divine Pulse back to Turn 1 if something cursed happened like 30% hit 1% crit, instead of resetting.
Frankly I like the turn wheel mechanic FAR better than casual mode as a way to make an easy mode. I think it helps people get better at a strategy game and helps you out if you misclick screwing your over. In my eyes it helps with learning strategy since you make a move and it doesn’t work you can see that it doesn’t and then can try something else. Given the fact that it is limited (and i think this is how you’d balance it) you can still have the risk of permadeath
Interesting reasoning (not sarcastic, I mean it genuinely.), I'm actually the exact opposite. I love casual mode and have despised every iteration of Divine Pulse. It's not because I'm unskilled at strategy games (came from other strategy games to FE), it's because I enjoy the strategies employed more in casual than I do in classic. I can beat classic with no problems and minimal rewind uses, but that's not Fun for me. Divine Pulse doesn't make it feel better for me as a "git gud" because I already Am good at strategy games, I just don't like that style of play that accompanies classic. (Example, I 100% enjoy plans like in a maddening casual type situation of "Move character B up, reliably proc Luna. Plan on character getting hit and taken out, opening the position to move character A up into position to absorb the next round" and so forth more than anything I did in TH or Echoes. Those plans were significantly more fun for me than Divine Pulse ever was, because I like playing each map like chess. Classic's strategies just aren't as fun for me specifically.)
For me the best comparison to a FE map using Divine Pulse is to roguelites' assist modes, if that makes sense. For those who don't play them, roguelites usually have where you try to play through essentially the "whole game" in one run, and at defeat, return you all the way to the start. However, some of these games will have modes that let you restart at the current room/level/etc instead of the beginning. And what I've noticed here when I use those modes on occasion, is that I get significantly more frustrated being trapped on the same level, than I do with most full run defeats. More time spent on an area that is frustrating, banging into different options with no success, maybe even getting sloppy or careless, traps you in a series of frustrating replays until you get out of that area, or stop using the mode, at least for me, and that's a similar feeling I get to Divine Pulse.
So yeah, it is super useful, and can save a run, but for some people, like me, it's just not Fun, whereas Casual mode is because it plays more to a "chess game but each map has all your pieces available at the start but can be removed from play for strats/sacrifices, or gambits" type strategizing form. What I'd wish for in a future game is balancing where turn-rewinds aren't necessary, with different modes available for everyone's different favored playstyle, instead of the reliance of turnwheel's existence to patch it up. (As others have stated, I also dislike the impact is has on the plot, or the implications of them, as if it's going to exist, I wish it was utilized more in the story, and so forth. Make it make sense and be something the characters know of and react to, if the game is going to lean on its existence.)
Thank you for offering your thoughts though! It was interesting to see why some people enjoy it more, and helps me accept its use and existence because even if it's not enjoyable to me, it might be to others. ^^ Sorry for the lengthy comment everyone!
One thing I wish more people would acknowledge (though they don't out of good faith, bless them) is that the Turnwheel mechanic more likely than not came about almost solely due to Intsys being well aware that most people who played Gaiden did not play it on original hardware, but played on emulator, which have savestates. Savestates are much closer to the Turnwheel, and it likely exists as the answer to savestates on consoles, which typically do not have them like PCs do. Knowing their fanbase was very used to emulating their old as balls Famicon games, they just bit the bullet and put it in, then kept it likely as a way to entice people to play on console over pirating their games through emulation, given how gung-ho their partner Nintendo is about emulating. The Turnwheel problem more just comes about from a community that got very comfortable with savestates just existing, due to emulation being the only way for non-Japanese fans, or fans not born in the 1980s, to be able to experience half of the entire franchise.
Players should be rewarded for not using rewinding. A game should always reward skill. Something very valuable but not one of a kind. In three houses, it should have been rare materials to forge those rusted weapons and repair relics/the scythe. The game rewards you with the ability to use stronger weapons with the trade off that you don't rewind. It was always a pain to use combat arts with relics since they eat up so many uses. Rewarding stat items would also be good. In future FE games, it could be bonus EXP. (Looking at you tellius remake.) Or maybe exclusive cosmetics. I don't think the answer is to limit these new quality of life mechanics but instead give very nice incentives to not use it. Want all the extra loot? Get good.
If anything Dragon Claws can be considered a Relic
I feel the turnwheel has actively made me a better player. By being able to go back immediately and figure out what I could have done differently, I learn. By resetting after a death, I learn nothing in particular because I cannot try again - the scenario no longer exists because the map will not go the same after I reset. I liked Casual Mode in Awakening and Fates, but acknowledge its not a good teaching tool in any capacity.
At the end of the day though, I'm never going to do a challenge run or do things that actively make my experience harder. I don't have the time to invest or the patience to be frustrated by things that should be bringing me joy.
An idea I had for reworking the turnwheel would be to make the uses a limited resource that the player obtains over the course of the game. For example completing a chapter would award a use of the turnwheel which could be used in a future chapter, uses could be stockpiled for a difficult chapter or for assurance in case of bad rng. This would add an extra layer of strategy while keeping permadeath as a valid option should the player wish to save their turnwheel uses.
I feel it should just be scaled based the player’s difficulty just for the sake of simplistically. So higher difficulty you have less uses
The problem with limited resource is, this leads to hoarding.
@@tirex3673 nobody's gonna hoard a fuckin turnwheel use if their unit dies lmfao
13:40 I don't like the "add more units" solution. More units is bound to mean less well developed characters, aswell as support bloat and driving up development costs (more assets, more voice actors, etc.). A smaller cast of deeper characters is way better than many, bound to be less interesting, characters and 20 extra cooking/fishing/training supports.