Look, I feel great. Do you know how rare it is for me to feel great? But also I'm too tired to do any proper work and anyway, it's bad form to do work at night, isn't it? Put them off until 9 am tomorrow when it's normal to work. I'm a freelancer. If I don't enforce a good work hour, no one else will. No one but my frail body ravaged with such a myriad of cryptic health problems I don't know how to justify its existence. Let's not make that worse.
Fire Emblem! I will never tire of talking about this game series even though absolutely no one I know IRL plays it and I have no online community where anyone plays it. It's basically everything I ever need or want from video games: turn-based gameplay with a measurable abstract systems utilizing Small Numbers, with well-designed well-developed characters interacting with each other within an interesting larger narrative that gives a lot of space for interpretations. That's mouthful as heck, so a simpler way to say it: it's anime chess.
I love abstract systems in games. I haven't entirely articulated what Abstract System is for me, but it's basically the way that games make you think within its rules. Like how battles are you slinging numbers to make numbers go down as an abstraction of actual battles. How walking is getting from one pixel to another. How dialogue trees and skill checks are abstractions for human capability. I don't want realism in my games. The world is complicated and impossible to be entirely understood by one human brain. I want games to be able to abstract them and limit them into the things that matter for that particular game.
So the abstraction in Fire Emblem is grid based movement and interaction of numbers. A limited set of Small Numbers. Small Numbers is important. Some RPGs add so much numbers and RNG to their e.g. damage calculation, that the Numbers can reach up to the hundreds. It gives you a vague idea of what your choice actually do. By contrast, numbers in Fire Emblem can be calculated by hand. Damage is straight up (Strength Stat + Weapon Might) - Enemy's Defense Stat.
I once heard someone said something that goes like, "You should be careful if the smallest number in your game is 1. Because the next number is 2, and that's twice as powerful." And that sounds super silly unless you really understand where they were getting at, in which case it sounds pretty darn profound. If your system rely on Small Numbers, then every small changes will matter. If most of the numbers you deal with only goes up to, say, 5, then just an increase of 1 is significant. Significant and measurable within a blink. But if you're used to seeing numbers that go up to, say, 3129 whatever, then an increase of 120 might not seem like a lot. Or at the very least, your brain will take a while to process how much of that it is, even though it might have some profound gameplay effect. You might as well ditch the number and just trust whenever the description says "Will deal more damage".
I like Fire Emblem partially because I like to calculate things. I like things that can be measured. I like to know how much damage, exactly, I will deal to that guy over there and how much of their hits I can take before I die.
Of course, there's an RNG element in the case of calculating Critical hits and Avoid, but even here Small Numbers prevail. I still have no idea what the formula for calculating it is, but the result is always visible: e.g. this attack has an 80% change of hitting, and a 3% chance of dealing a critical hit, which will deal 3x damage. 80% is good enough to be a given, and 3% is small enough to ignore, so this is as good as done. But then you get some fun times like a 48% chance of hitting, but you can hit 4 times and you only need 1 of them to connect. That's statistically a good chance. It might not be precisely measurable (unless you're a damn math nerd who likes to calculate everything, like I am sometimes), but it's still instinctively measurable. And that's what Small Numbers does.
Good Lord did I just write like five paragraphs about numbers in a video game? Do I even have the strength to talk about the characters and stories? Damn, I guess I really a writing an ode to Fire Emblem.
I think I've mentioned this before on Twitter, but Fire Emblem has Memorable Characters, with all that capital M and C. This is something I see more in Anime than in western-made stories: every characters have unique, distinctive personality traits. Sometimes it makes them feel archetypical, clichéd, caricatures: a whole human being distilled into just a couple of quirks. But Anime and Anime-adjacent stories understands that art does not need to imitate life. Life is infinitely complex. Stylization and exaggeration are solid methods to simplify it, to really focus on the story it's trying to tell instead of being overwhelmed by the impossibility of completely imitating life. Similar, perhaps, to how abstract systems in video games does not need to be realistic.
Fire Emblem is a game series where each game has like two dozens characters. Unless they're the main characters, they don't get to talk much, and yet they all have personalities packed into the few lines of dialogues they have. Other than that, they have their personalities packed into their visual design, their weapons and abilities, how they're deployed in the game. With such constraints, it makes sense to have some of their traits exemplified, exaggerated. Here's a knight who's all prim and proper and loyal. Here's another who likes to slack off and hit on girls. Here's another who's weak, but tries his best. Without exaggeration, they'll just be Generic Soldier #21.
And then, having given you the pieces, having told you what the pieces' colours and general shape is, the game let you decide who they are. I admit, I haven't articulated what sort of black magic they're pulling here, but the characters took life of their own as I play. I keep making up scenarios in my head of how they interact with each other, how each battle play out, what they do together outside of battles. All these Memorable Characters don't exist in a vacuum. They're constantly in contact with each other, and having Memorable Traits help anchor who they are within this space.
So past Fire Emblem games tend to have Memorable Characters, even though their in-game character development is short enough to fit in a paragraph. And then Fire Emblem: Three Houses came out and holy shit, holy shit, you guys. On the surface they all seem like the good ol' Anime characters with quirks, but then the more you get to know them, the more you actually get to know them. Each characters have layers and layers on top of layers. Each of a single character's traits play off against each other, connecting what seems to be random quirks into a coherent narrative: each character has their own fully-formed story to tell.
This is my shit. This is entirely my shit. You can't believe how much of my shit this is. I haven't even gotten to the part where I connect the characters with the character-based narrative and how the gameplay actively championed these characters, and how the permadeath system really pushes into that. I'm tired. What the hell.
God, I love Fire Emblem.
