New Fire Emblem isn't Fire Emblem
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The most recent Iwata Asks involved the development team of Fire Emblem, who shared some startling news about their new DS game, Mystery of the Emblem out today (apparently) in Japan: you can toggle off perma-death. They also say that perma death is the soul of the game, the thing that makes it different and unique. In that sense, it’s like having the option to automatically resolve all conversations in Mass Effect 2, because you don’t want to deal with the plot. Why? In the name of courting the casual player. The casual player, of course, is too dumb to realize they can restart to get their characters back, and Nintendo doesn’t want to force anyone to have to deal with anything as serious as character death in game about war between nations. That would not be tasteful. Removing character death in Fire Emblem is like making an alternate cut of Grave of the Fireflies where everything’s okay! No one died! Nothing challenging happens here, just some pretty pictures and people persevering even when they’ve given up all hope! Fire Emblem was already pretty much a series without a point: it was fun, but it was pachinko machine fun. It was playing a game of chess fun. Character death gave the plot some extra weight, made you think, you know, this could be the last battle for any of these people. It made everything weighty and gave the game friction. And now you can remove the friction, if you just want to fry your brain instead of actually doing anything worthwhile. Whoopee for Nintendo! |
I think it is unfair to call it a Pachinko kind of fun. Pachinko is as fun as pressing a button to get either nothing or a piece of food pellet. It’s not fun – it’s mind conditioning. Also, since there is no way to ‘lose’ in the ME plot options, I don’t thing the comparison is fair.
Turning death on and off is pretty cool IMO. If some people can have fun this way, more power to them. What they should also tackle is STOP PEOPLE FROM RESTARTING THE CHAPTER to save a character. I mean, if you failed and let your character die, you should live with the consequences until the bitter end – even if the price is to restart a campaign simply because you have no more characters anymore. What happens now is a situation where nobody dies depending on the player’s will to grind the level again.
We should never rewards players for spending time with the game. They should be rewarded for their skill.
It does seem like all the GBA games though. As long as Nintendo keep throwing nothing but cosmetic makeovers of the same game and charging us full price, I refuse to go back to the Fire Emblem franchise.