Ever think about what the games you play say about you? Or maybe your habits while you play them? Despite not fully enjoying the genre, I’m drawn to strategy games, particularly turn-based ones with idiosyncratic units on a chess-like grid. Maybe I first came to them under some rule of opposites; I actually don’t like chess, tend to be more impulsive in thought, and wish for more personal expression in my play. It’s possible there’s a part of me that needs something slow, allows me to think things out at my own pace. But there’s something beneath that, a weird perfectionism that compels me to start games over completely from scratch the moment they deviate from my ideal state. I have people asking me about how far I’ve gotten in Fire Emblem Fates, and I’m always ashamed to tell them I started over… again.
When I played games earlier in the series, I’d blame this on the permadeath function core to the game. I couldn’t stand losing a character that possibly had more to contribute to story, and would end up never completing the games because it became too hard to save them all. But now that the latest release has a mode where none of your characters die, I still find myself restarting over and over again. Having not read much about the differences between the versions of the game, I chose Conquest because the characters seem like they would appeal to me more, which I was right about. As a consequence, I had no idea it’d be an overall harder game, even on the easiest settings. It’s not the battles necessarily, but the story content that comes out of the support system, which requires strategically placing units together on the battlefield so they bond more. Because Conquest has limited ways to level up these support ranks, I realized that there was even another, possibly more insidious expression of difficulty in this game: I have to manage my battles according to who I definitely needed to ship and have children even more urgently than I need to actually win the fights themselves.
My usual habits in Fire Emblem have me testing out the waters and seeing the chemistry between the units before I marry them off, having my characters play the field as I decided which ones I’d like to pair up for good and decide when is the right time to have a time-traveling kid. But this time I got to the end of the game without having recruited a single one, which is easy to do in a game where you can’t grind very easily. I instantly restarted. I’ve been playing multiple times to see the different relationships, awaiting the time I create the perfect save with all the right pairings and perfect children. But I’m coming to find that I won’t get that in Conquest, unless I want to pay more of course. Where I thought I could escape the difficulty of the game through casual settings, I realized there was an inescapable hard mode waiting for me: nothing will ever be perfect, some characters won’t marry or have children, and effectively, the story will always be missing something.
I’m still a bit in denial. I’ve considered paying for some opportunities to grind or getting the ‘true’ third version of the game. I’ve complained to friends that the Conquest is a bad attempt to get money out of me, ultimately incomplete without all the other versions and DLC. But it’s slowly dawning on me that a newer form of difficulty has cropped up. When talking about ‘new difficulties,’ I point to the peculiarities of difficulty settings in BioWare games, which are at this point more critically known for their narrative and romances than they are for their battles. Choosing different difficulties shifts how battles work, but not the conversations or relationships. There’s this underlying assumption that there is little to be had in subjective, qualitative, or probably more succinctly said, emotional difficulty. Difficulty is usually restrained to the quantitative, and topics of personal expression and taste are left to be these abstract, woo concepts that most designers don’t pay a lot of attention to manipulating. But here, Conquest is giving me a real hard time by making me have an incomplete game, or at least play it over and over again to understand my own ‘true’ path. This contrasts with games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age which aim to further simplify how a player can manipulate these permutations by creating tools and not considering the complexity there is with emotional difficulty. This is a contrast between being presented with obvious, signed choices that you’re supposed to care about and understanding the small, mundane choices you’ve made by landing yourself in a mess you couldn’t really see coming until it arrived.
This opens up a lot of opportunities for new kinds of play, considering this kind of difficulty isn’t necessarily inhibitive unless you have an overbearing perfectionistic streak like I do. My time with this experience could be seen as researching, trying to explore the different corners to eventually express my ideal state of the game, where I allocate the few resources I have to create the story I’m able to create. It shows that despite casual modes being added for new audiences might seem like watering down the game, it’s actually opening up a new kind intense play previously unavailable in the series, and continues to expand its design further past pure quantitative strategy. I’m curious to see more games that push even further, and where the series will go knowing that this is an integral aspect of play for the newer wave of players that now enjoy the series.
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